Nokia 3310 11:48am 03-04-2025 BST
oh, i think it's working, yeah, it's typing again.
I found a phone. I think it's rare. Keep getting banned from Ebay. can you just let me borrow your account?
Please stop hanging up on me.
Just, look, this is getting annoying I can see you've been reading my messages can you just pick up? I think this can make us so much money. I'm not messing around. Lauren please
please just pick up the phone. Why are you leaving me on read?
11:55am 03-04-2025 BST
can you stop i'm trying to [illegible] there's a symbol on the thing its [illegible] connected.
12:20pm 03-04-2025 BST
there's flies,[illegible] midges, moths, and flies [illegible]
13:20pm 03-04-2025 BST
Look, i'm sorry i didn't try to call you sooner, i know, i'm trying, I didn't mean to run away but i'm safe, I got fired and i panicked and I thought...
I'm okay, and it's fine, i get it. I'm glad you're okay, I saw the message you wrote. Maybe you can send words or something? Not just an emoji?
I get your pissed off you don't really need to be so childish. I don't want to keep leaving these.
Look, I'm fine. I'm at my parents house in Lincolnshire currently, they left for work maybe a few hours ago but honestly I was asleep. I'm just tired. I just feel so tired and I just want to talk to you.
I think once I sell this thing I'll be better. I've already drafted the listing but it just keeps getting taken down. Let me explain, just let me try to explain?
13:25pm 03-04-2025 BST
Yeah? I assume the thumbs-up is a yeah.
I guess it was the little blue plastic that caught my eye, it was sticking out of the mud from the side of the bank, unmistakable between the shitty water, sepia mud, and rotting grass.
I don't know if you've ever been to Lincolnshire. There's not much to see.
No, sorry, that was a bit harsh. It's pretty in it's own way, but I was here half my childhood, so the prettiness smudged off a long time ago. I spent so much of my life here trying to escape it that I never really appreciated the twisted prettiness of it.
There is beauty here I guess. A lonely beauty of emptiness. The shops are mostly gone now, the high-street is empty. The Victorian shop-front facades that used to hold bakeries and coffee shops, little newsagents and antiques are now melded into rows of grotesque purple & green vape shops with magenta lighting.
I remember there was a 17th century artist we saw once in a museum. You were telling me about some other paintings as we walked past. I'm sorry. I'll try to listen more. Do you remember? You stopped me, asked me why I wasn't listening.
But I was just staring at the painting.
Do you remember that painting?
It was this beautiful still life of fruits and flowers, ripening fruit, and flowering buds. The soft lights and shadows fell on each individual petal, it's creators obsessive attention shining through. You said you've seen a thousand of them before. You laughed at the right half of the canvas, featuring a howler monkey on the table going to town on a ripening fruit, juice splattering across his face.
We kept walking. I didn't talk to you about it. I don't know why.
But below the ripe fruit bowl, and the vase of flowering roses, something caught my eye. In the same vibrant shades and hues, with the same gorgeous detail lay dead and rotting exotic birds.
The monkey wasn't biting into a fruit.
Still beautiful in a way; bright coats of amber and lilac, but still and rotting, small dots of flies [illegible] circling carcasses.
This town evokes that same feeling, that same weird beauty. The mixture of life, death and wilderness fighting for the same space on the canvas.
There's no hills to look out on, even when you get out of the city it's just fields, canals, and little dispersed bits of wood & nature clinging to life between the empty new builds and encroaching pointless developments.
It's strange, but there's a wildness to those areas that you don't see in the rest of the UK. You get a dread that comes over you when you approach a larger bit of wood especially, it's this feeling in the back of your head that you can't escape, a question that noiselessly forms towards the wood.
Why are you still here?
And sometimes, through the wind, the whistles and straining of the branches, I sometimes used to think that I could make out a crackling, hoarse call in response.
Interloper.
Sorry. I think I've been getting a bit feverish. Just. Just give me a second. I was talking about the phone. Let me call you back. Please don't leave me on voicemail.
13:30pm 03-04-2025 BST
I guess that's why I noticed the phone on my jog.
There's what i like to call a crossing, a few miles from my parents house. It's one of those spots. You go from a vast metal fence on your left, protecting the docked canal boats from intrusions and a construction site, empty and abandoned on your right.
The paved concrete pathway suddenly gives way to dirt.
And all of a sudden, flanking your sides are willows and oaks, branches on either side winding and weaving themselves into 8ft tall hallways. Rather than canal boats and metal fences, the canal lifts, the corners smudge. The roots of the trees on the left poke out into the water, the trees tilting more and more until they too disappear.
Just past a collapsed willow was where I saw the Nokia. You know exactly the one i'm talking about. Almost everyone had one in school at some point. Couldn't do much apart from play snake and text, but those things were indestructible.
Maybe that's what made me pick it up. What made me walk through the swarm of midges and flies, squelching in the soft dirt of the slightly stinking canal.
Half buried in the silty mud, it's casing was caked in soil and dirt, but it seemed to still be intact. I don't particularly love old tat, but there was something nostalgic about seeing that relic - and I kind of wanted to know if it still worked. so I picked it up, wiped off the mud as much as i could, wrapped it in a bundle of larger leaves, and placed it in my pocket.
As soon as I did, the weight of the phone almost felt comforting. It's hard to describe, but it's like the weight of it brought me back. Back to easier times. Maybe I could repair it, see how far I could get on Snake. It was something exciting that drew me out of the hollowness of the town. It was then when I felt my smart-watch vibrate.
A new device has registered.
3:20am 03-04-2025 BST
Hi all - i think i may have found a collectors item, just wanted to check if anyone has any idea how much this thing might be worth? It's a slightly beaten up Nokia 3310, but i think it's special. It seems to have wifi, bluetooth. This thing must be 20 years old by now, and yet the battery seems to be completely fine, so someone definitely took good care of it.
There's even an app on it that seems to be able to transcribe everything I say. Might be some kind of experimental first edition type thing, but there's no serial number, only this kind of weird logo that seems to be etched on the back.
It's really faded and I can't really pick it up on my own phone, but there's a kind of h in the top left corner, and a little circle with an arrow in the top right one. Kind of looks like a smiley face? Can't really find anything when i'm googling for companies that have worked with Nokia.
The one annoying thing is that no matter how many times I try, to turn it off, whenever I wake up, it's always on, always requesting to connect with all my bluetooth devices.
Does anyone know what this thing might be worth?