I was bemused to receive an e-mail notification that a comment had been added to one of my weblog entries, bearing in mind that I haven't posted anything on my weblog for about six weeks. Stranger still it turned out to be in response to an entry from February 2006, in which I lambasted the Coca Cola company for refusing to accept that there can be such a person in the world as a grown man who does not own a mobile phone.

It turned out that the 'comment' was actually just a spam link to a mobile phone selling website. Slightly ironic that such a link was put at the end of an entry which expressed my loathing for mobile phones, but then I suppose the automated systems set up to inflict this blight upon us haven't yet developed the sophistication to work out whether the targets of their invasiveness are sympathetic. Not unlike mobile phone users themselves, in fact.

The sales manager of the mobile phone website in question, needless to say, denies all knowledge. So I can only conclude that it must have been one of those people who go around visiting weblogs and placing links to arbitrary websites just for the hell of it. Come on, which of us can't say they've done it? It's the only rational explanation.

The irony of all this is that it's come merely days after I have been obliged, as part of my work, to take delivery of my first mobile phone. No matter that the phone will be switched on only one week in four, and even then only in order that I can be contacted in an emergency - it was still a moment of profound disappointment and disillusionment to me. This may seem an extreme reaction to a minor event, but it comes hot on the heels of me acquiring a passport and flying off to meetings in Germany and France, in relation to new aspects of my work which also seem (no pun intended) foreign to me. Pure financial necessity has obliged me to be pushed out of my comfort zone (no bad thing in itself) into areas which feel strange and discomfiting to me (a bad thing in itself). It's one of the reasons I have posted so little here lately - the fabric of my working life has altered so much that I find myself almost devoid of moments of respite in which to be bemused or artificially incensed by some aspect of modern life. I'm spending most of my time just trying to remember who I am.