In a Zhongshan park, an iPhone can be a dangerous thing

My so-called friends are all laughing at me because I don't follow the sheepy herd in this iPhone age. Or Samsung age. Whatever. They call me a Luddite and wonder if I also eat bark and use a bicycle-driven washing machine. (Yeah, like I would wear clothes made of fabric when there are so many good metal and wood options out there!)

But why would I throw away my excellent Nokia from 2006? It's fallen from a very consider-able height and has been submerged in water more than once, only to come out the other side beaming with youthful - yes, youthful - and renewed health.

I use phones for texting and making calls. What else would I need them for, I ask, as my friends zoom off on GPS-driven holidays in places they have found with "apps".

Still, I can see the point of iWhatevers sometimes. Like, for example, last November, when I was playing cards with three friends in a park in Zhongshan; we got into a discussion about the meaning of some word and a quick google was all that was needed for us to forget about it.

Later, four boys came running up to us as we sat around a stone table. They looked like urchins, really; faces and clothes dirty the way few children are nowadays, clothes torn. Fearlessly the bigger ones started bombarding us with questions in hoarse, post-milk-teeth voices. Only one of them could speak Cantonese - a tragic indicator of how the mainland government has succeeded in suppressing other languages.

They wanted to know why we had blue eyes, yellow hair, no hair, why L was so tall and what we were doing there. As we played hand after hand they raced around the table at full speed and top volume. The smallest boy toppled over a couple of times, but got up without self-pity and with only a minimum of tears.