hppy nu yr :-)

This New Year’s Eve, I received sea­sonal text mes­sages from the fol­low­ing far-flung loc­a­tions: Put­ney, some­where in Kent, Bris­tol, Bolton, Don­caster, Munich, Johan­nes­burg, New York and Kyoto. Truly, my world­wide net­work of friends and rela­tions is shock­ingly cosmopolitan.

The ‘nu yr txt’ (see what I did there?) seems to have become the 21st cen­tury ver­sion of the annual Christ­mas card, in which some dis­tant rel­at­ive writes out the same words time after time, detail­ing the aca­demic achieve­ments of their off­spring and prom­ising to get in touch soon to meet up for a drink (whereupon you don’t hear from them for another twelve months). Of course, text mes­sages are much shorter, and thank­fully unable to con­tain much more than a few words of greet­ing, which is fine by me.

I don’t wish to decry the text mes­sages I received, because although I was fast asleep at mid­night — hav­ing once again gone to bed early to avoid the hor­rendous social stigma of being home alone on Decem­ber 31 (no, please don’t pity me) — I was excep­tion­ally grate­ful to find all the sealed envel­ope graph­ics queued up on my phone when I woke up this morn­ing. They man­aged to bring a warm glow even to my increas­ingly hard heart. It means that people were think­ing of me, even if I was just another name on a long dis­tri­bu­tion list.

For me, the prob­lem occurs when send­ing or reply­ing to such mes­sages. Unlike, I sense, most prac­tical and time-efficient people, I don’t repeat send just one simple and straight­for­ward text mes­sage at this time of year. Oh no. Instead, I’ve just spent well over half an hour click­ing around my phone’s tiny keypad in order to craft indi­vidual replies to each recip­i­ent — even though each mes­sage says more or less the same thing, with a few vari­ations: “Happy new year! Must get together in Janu­ary!” (fol­lowed, of course, by a radi­antly beam­ing smi­ley). I’m sure that this is closely related to my anally retent­ive atti­tude towards employ­ing proper gram­mar and com­plete Eng­lish words, without ever resort­ing to the dreaded ‘text speak’.

I pre­dict that 2005 will find me as con­stantly amazed by my over-analysis of 160 char­ac­ters of text as I have been since the very first time I picked up a mobile phone. How incred­ibly for­tu­nate, then, that one of my vague res­ol­u­tions for the new year is to get out more.