I don't have a mobile phone. And I feel marvellous Not everyone has a mobile phone. I KNOW already what my dying words will be, so you can start chipping out the tombstone. "If only I'd had a mobile phone," will be my last feeble whisper. I'll probably be in the Outback, three hours' drive from the nearest hospital, bitten by a taipan, having heart pangs as the venom takes hold, crows and dingoes circling. "If only he'd had a mobile," the cops will say when they find my corpse. Well, a lonely death in the desert is a small price to pay for not having to carry one of those infernal bleeping contraptions, those tools of Beelzebub. I've never owned a mobile and hope never to. To be in constant contact with the world is like a waking nightmare for me. To be always on call, to be sucked into the vortex of jibber jabber, where there is barely enough time to answer the last text message before three more arrive. Where people bombard you with images of their pets, their bathroom renovations, their varicose vein operations. Where nothing is too trivial to be deemed vital information. My family got its first mobile phone because of Ivan Milat. Yeah, the serial killer guy. My wife is from Sydney and she often drives up the Hume with the children to see the folks. I started to have niggling visions of the car breaking down near the Belanglo State Forest, Milat country. What would she do? Flag down help? Hello, Mr Milat. Abandon the car and walk with the children? Hitchhike and leave the children in the locked car? So she got a phone, a clunky thing that just made phone calls. These days, of course, she has a gizmo that can photograph the dark side of the moon by bouncing gamma rays off Venus or something. Every mobile is now a camera and everybody takes pictures of everything. I reckon we will soon have photographed every square centimetre of the world and if we stick all the pictures together with Sellotape, we could build a new planet (it's just a theory at this stage, I haven't worked out the science). Every mobile is also a hand-held personal performance space where lives are paraded for the world to see. You see them on the trains. Seat by seat, row after row, all scrolling little screens. Telling the world what they're doing and finding out what everyone else is doing. It's an unsettling sight. I sometimes feel like I'm in the movie Blade Runner, where it is impossible to tell the robots from the humans. I guess my greatest objection to mobile phone culture is that people seem to have no time left to think. We have no time for philosophy. I'm not talking big-book-type philosophy, Kant or Descartes or Socrates. Just pondering, thinking about stuff. Thinking, not texting. Thinking, not tweeting. Thinking, not telling everyone on the train about how pissed you were last night and how Scherryll is a real bitch. I'm often accused of being a Luddite, someone opposed to progress and technology. Not so. Don't come between me and my iPod, let me tell you. And digital photography? No more evil darkroom chemicals or trips to the chemist. Wonderland. But I don't want a phone with me every second, I don't need an umbilical cord to the world. I've hung the "do not disturb" sign on the doorknob. I will admit, however, to being a wee bit of a hypocrite when it comes to phones. I have borrowed other people's mobiles when necessary. I'm a bit like that guy who never brings beer to a party, but is quite happy to drink yours. I can live with the hypocrisy. I just can't live with a thing in my pocket that goes off every two minutes to unload more narcissistic drivel into my world. I console myself with the notion that, as a non-phoner, I am in good company. Albert Einstein and Max Planck never had mobiles. If they had, they would never have had time to come up with general relativity or quantum theory. They'd be too busy texting each other photos of their coffees.