Dear Apple, I have updated my iPhone and my flashlight, the tool that has seen me through many a complicated Nocturnal iManoeuvre, has disappeared. No longer can I – with one hand and the flick of a finger – do important things such as finding my glass of water without knocking everything off the bedside table, or shining the torch in my husband’s face, FBI-style, to interrupt his snoring. Not without great effort and potential danger can I navigate my way to the en suite to have a wee, and it’s impossible to see, at an instantly illuminated glance, what the dog is chewing behind the curtains.
Other things I can’t do without my flashlight:
Search for the Apple TV remote, the only remote control in the world that has been specifically designed to be nigh on impossible to locate without the aid of a metal detector and/or an experienced investigator from Scotland Yard. It weighs around a hundredth of a milligram, is what can only be described as wafer thin, and has the same dimensions as a gnat’s surfboard. If you own an Apple TV (little media box that connects you to iTunes and so on) then you will know that to own an Apple TV is to spend your life hunting for the stupid slither of a remote control. Don’t, whatever you do, ever put it down on the sofa – it can slip into the smallest leathery crease and will only be found once you have dismantled every single element of the upholstery. “Oh there it is darling, hiding behind that old two pence piece.” Anyway, I digress: the iFlashlight is an essential when hunting for the iRemote – checking in the darkness beneath the sofa, investigating the inner depths of the radiator, making sure it hasn’t slipped through some sort of microscopic hole into another dimension… Stupid remote. The other thing I struggle to do without my iTorch?
Read menus. Why is it now a “thing” for trendy restaurants to pair illegible menus with a complete lack of any interior lighting? Why do they now have the lighting so low that you risk serious injury if you wish to use a steak knife? Why do they all print their menus onto grey card using pale grey ink in a feathery, lightweight font? It’s like trying to decode second world war secrets that have been written on parchment using weak tea. Thank goodness for the flashlight – if I didn’t have my makeshift torch permanently on my person then I’d have to resort to eating exclusively in brightly lit spaces, such as Nandos and Giraffe.
Update: the flashlight hasn’t disappeared, after all that. It just doesn’t come up on the little screen when I flick upwards, it’s on the next screen over. Still one swipey action too many for my liking, but at least it’s still there. That sort of ruins my entire post, really, doesn’t it? I’ll have to find something else to moan about. Oh, I know…
…my baby was sick in the night last week and so, being the paranoiac pregnant woman that I am, I decided to bunk down in her bedroom so that I could sleep with my head next to her cot and obsessively monitor her breathing. I “slept” on the John Lewis Florence cuboid fold-out bed I bought last year. If you’re wondering about the comfort level then you can easily recreate my experience: go out onto your patio, roll the barbeque out of the way so that you have a space approximately 6ft by 4ft and lie down in a sleeping bag. That, my friends, is about the comfort equivalent of the JL bed. It’s like sleeping on a pallet of bricks, albeit a palette of bricks that has been allowed to grow a thick-ish layer of spongey moss. If you want feel the physical aftermath of this sleeping experience but don’t wish to spend a night on the patio then just get a friend (or foe) to break a few of your ribs with a baseball bat and pull your neck as though he/she is killing a chicken. That’ll give you quite a genuine result. All joking aside, this “bed” could be vastly improved with a layer of memory foam or something thrown on the top – it’s not totally a lost cause. And I do like that I can flip it out at a moment’s notice and that it folds back up into a cool and unobtrusive seat. But I shan’t be hurrying back for a quick catnap, not unless someone’s already hogging the patio…
0 Comments