Do you know what I’d love for Christmas? For my phone to go away. I’ve a love/hate relationship with it, but it’s next to impossible to leave it aside from a farm perspective anymore.

It’s become a necessary evil at this stage and there are times when I hate having the phone with me at work, because I know I’ll get distracted with something unnecessary. Saying that, at the same time if I got injured or needed help and I didn’t have it, among the first things I’d be asked is, why didn’t you have your phone?

Oddly enough, one of the ways I’ve found to avoid or reduce the distraction is to fire on music, a podcast or an audiobook on my phone. I can flake through a mountain of work then, until a phone call or text knocks momentum. It’s an affliction.

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It’s become an important piece of kit in the day-to-day farm operations though. Aside from the communication aspect, the basics of a torch or the weather apps, heat and health monitoring for stock and calving cameras among others. The mart apps and banking too. There is now so much you can do on a farm just by standing still.

The camera and gallery are my cattle diary now. I tend to take a photo; the day the bull goes out with the cows and the day he comes out from them. Nothing formal mind, but just one so that I can easily check the date when it comes to scanning time. Silage is the same, just in case I don’t get to put it in the physical diary.

The downside to that is there’s less chance to switch off because of it. That’s the bit I’m going to try and do for the next week or 10 days.

My social media engagement is on the floor compared to what it once was and that’s no harm.

In the immediate aftermath of storm Éowyn with the power out and phone reception gone with it, I slowly but surely saw the urge to look at the phone disappear. I had to leave the phone above a curtain rail in order to get any bit of reception and one or two friends on SMS messages.

It was a trip back in time, as I tried to recall where the reception spots in the house were before masts were put up locally. This house was a reception blackspot and phone calls were generally made in the shed until the masts came on the scene.

We had better memory capacity before mobile phones. There was a time where I didn’t just know my relations’ phone numbers off by heart but my friend’s house numbers too, along with the vets, both pubs in Ballinascarthy and the co-op. We were more organised too. On Friday in school you arranged to meet the next night and people were there, with no endless messages about nothing. You were there or you weren’t.

There was an extra element of fear too. Most people under 40 will never know the dread of having to ring their girlfriend’s house knowing there was a good chance her parents might answer.

One of the most ironic parts of this mini anti-phone rant was mostly written on my phone. It was the evening of storm Éowyn and with no wifi nor data available, I typed out a few thoughts on what life pre-mobile phone was like. As radio reports came through in the following days, I decided to hold back. I felt it wasn’t appropriate to put my little jog down memory lane to print when people were heading for their second and third week without power.