Technology

I read recently that this month marks 40 years since Britain’s first mobile phone call was made. It was in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1985 in Parliament Square, when one Michael Harrison rang his Vodafone chairman father, Sir Ernest Harrison. It would, of course, take many years – and much hankering and hysteria – before I got my own mobile A few years later, one sunny Saturday morning, my father took delivery of his first company car. I must have been about ten years old and can recall the sheer thrill of seeing something outside our house that wasn’t one of my mother’s seemingly endless succession of

Were there arguments? Undoubtedly. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, it was a dead cert that Great Aunt Mary would prefer BBC Two’s festive celebration from Westminster Cathedral (complete with the puberty-defying nearly-15-year-old Anglesey treble Aled Jones) to Kenny Everett’s reworking of A Christmas Carol on BBC One (louche, anarchic and probably regrettable, with its jokes about a pudding with cystitis and pantomime-style wordplay of the ‘Good golly, Miss Marley?’ variety). And it was 1985, so only 30 per cent of British homes owned a video recorder, making the ‘what to watch’ argument notably fraught in the season of peace and goodwill toward men. The problem with anticipation is the element of

Marco Pierre White may have earned a reputation as the tousle-haired kitchen bad boy who once made Gordon Ramsay cry, but these days he spends his mornings rather more quietly, enjoying his kippers. Yet in his retirement, he can still cause controversy. He recently told a podcast how he cooks his kippers. ‘On a plate, paint it with butter, wrap in cling film, in the microwave, two to two and a half minutes.’ A microwave? Really, Marco?! Yes. As far as kippers go, his reasoning is spot on. ‘Most people put them under the grill, which intensifies the salt’. Meanwhile, boiling them – jugged kippers – washes away the flavour.

Ask my friends and family and they’ll tell you: I am an electric car bore. I’m not a gushing enthusiast. I’m more the negative kind of EV dullard. I can’t stop telling people about the horror of driving these wretched things. I’m really not like this about other subjects, or indeed about life. I’m generally pretty positive and optimistic. But I have an EV. I rely on it to get me from A to B, at all hours, in all weather conditions, and perhaps, heaven forbid, even at short notice. You might not be surprised to hear that my electric car is sorely deficient in doing all these things. Let’s