A Range Rover killed my iPhone at the weekend. It was a shocking moment as I picked it up from the garage forecourt, irretrievably extinct, squashed out of shape by the monster’s left wheel. So instant and brutish was its demise I’m amazed there aren’t states of the US considering it as a means of execution.
The specifics of the event were mundane. The phone had dropped, unnoticed, from my pocket as I got out of my wife’s car at a motorway petrol station. Nine times out of 10 this would not have mattered but, on this occasion, my wife was feeling public-spirited and so, having filled-up, decided to move the car — something she would never normally do — to allow the Range Rover behind her access to the pump. She even, in the style of some movie thriller, waved at me to let me know she was moving as I headed back to the vehicle.
In the film version I would have been captured in ultra-slow motion, silently screaming “NO!” as I rushed to stop the impending catastrophe. But I was not, in fact, alive to the danger until the Apple was well and truly stewed. Even when I saw its body near the monster’s wheel, I expected some sign of life, a still-flickering light refracted through the shattered screen; a tearful last text as it shuffled off this silicon coil. But no, this was the deadest dead phone imaginable.