I watched the Nokia sail over the apartment blocks over the road from the Cafe de Paris and into the Hossegor night. Seven initial good years as a basic telecommunications device and the last six years as a poor prop in bad joke and, just like that, it was gone. Say what you want about Albee Layer, and I just might later, but the fucker has a good arm.
The Nokia was blue. A plastic blue that only a Nokia 108, made in 2004 can be. Even in 2005 when it was given to me by Andy King in France, it was the most basic phone on the market. No camera. No memory. It could, just about, make phone calls. Kingy used it a burner and still having 15 Euros credit on it handed it over to me when he was leaving France.
I used it for the first few years on all my trips to France. You couldn’t change the language and so predictive wasn’t an option. It would take me about 20 minutes for a single text. Still, this was a time when international roaming charges could bankrupt you and the savings just about make up for the antiquated technology. It was also unbreakable and unstealable, both useful characteristics given the way I acted on French surfing holidays. I couldn’t shake it. The Nokia was like shit to blanket. Along with my 6’6” Al Byrne six channel bottom it was the only possession I’d kept for more than half a decade.
In 2012 though technology had moved on. The iPhone was five years old. Smart phones had a computer processors that could power a rocket to NASA. Everyone now had a high powered camera. Selfies were a thing. And it was into this new digital space that the analogue Nokia came back into its own.
I was out with Handsome Nathan, who isn’t named ironically. It was late, in the Rockfood, and unlike me he was generating interest from the opposite sex. After a while, bored and jealous, I asked one of the aforementioned young French girls to take a pic of Nath and I. With the Nokia. We quickly discovered that giving a young person this antiquated technology was like handing them a dog turd. It reminded me of the youtube clip where a Dad asks his teenager kids to a listen to cassette tape when they have never seen one before. One tries to plug his earphones into the spool.
Anyway, we found it hilarious. We’d pose, they would try to take a photo and despite their mixture of confusion and disgust, we’d make them go through the whole silly pantomime. They’d hand it back, we’d pretend to laugh at the (nonexistent) image. The last punchline was I’d hold the Nokia to their iPhone and “bluetooth” the image.
If that sounds like a shit joke, you’d be right. Yet I persisted with it. For the next six years. The Nokia went in with the passport and the travel adapter. I’ve stopped traffic in Lisbon and had a stranger take group shots of 30 of us all in on the Nokia joke. In the Azores a lovely waitress climbed three flights of stairs to get better angle of our restaurant table. Gabriel Medina once snapped me in Hawaii. It’s traveled the length and breadth of Europe and taken thousands of non-photos.
Not any more though. This year on the evening after Julian Wilson and Ryan Callinan had made the Final of the Quik Pro France, we had gathered at Hossegor’s Cafe de Paris. The Nokia was out. Callinan, who’d seen the Nokia before, had wearily resigned himself to the gag. He’d later say it’s better just to smile, rather than put up with the whole stupid charade.
At one stage I asked for a shot of Albee Layer. I’d never met Albee, but I liked him. Charges massive waves, tells the truth, boosts humungous airs. What’s not to like? Well, and to be fair my recollection is a little hazy, Albee didn’t like the Nokia. He may have saw it as a tawdry, unimaginative, visual prank whose use by date was as old as the Nokia itself. He asked if he could throw it and get it out of his, and my life. I said yes. People had thrown it before. Richard “Dog” Marsh once through it against a Mundaka bar wall. All it does is split in half apart and the battery pops out. It doesn’t even fucking turn off.
Layer was different though. If he wasn’t a surfer, surely he would have been a Quarterback. I watched as the Nokia disced through the air and into orbit. It must have gone 200 metres, over a block of flats and, well it could still be traveling. He looked pleased. Callinan laughed, the prick. The Nokia was gone. The joke was over. And I hadn’t even backed up the images on the ICloud. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
