Real life | 21 May 2015 | The Spectator

You can’t always get what you want. And you can never get what you want if you want a phone with buttons. I’ve been nursing along an old BlackBerry. Well, I’ve been nursing a drawer full of old BlackBerrys. I began stockpiling them when the company started to nosedive and I realised I would soon be at the mercy of a touchscreen, trying to make my thumbs iPhone compatible.

I don’t want to hear anyone tell me it will all become easier when I get used to it. My podgy hands will never reinvent themselves as precision speed-pokers, capable of pinpoint accuracy on a typepad of minute characters of such insane sensitivity that a syringe used to inject sperm into ovaries would have trouble hitting the right letter.

It is said that if you gave a roomful of monkeys on typewriters long enough they would come up with the works of Shakespeare. Well, if you left me on an iPhone long enough I would come up with every book ever written and the entire contents of Stephen Hawking’s brain.

I just typed the opening sentences of this column into my iPhone and this is what came out: ‘Obi can’t ally gay what you want and foi xmas shay you anat Id what you am at morn ax pcpne with buttons.’

And that’s with predictive text. I’m not the only one. My friends increasingly text me complete nonsense on their so-called smartphones. The other day a horse-riding pal asked if I fancied going ‘on a little baldy’. I think he was suggesting a hack on Ranmore Common but hey, maybe we should go to Little Baldy mountain trail in Sequoia National Park, California, see what happens.