Been a weird week.

My mind has been flitting between ma-ho-sively different things. On Tuesday I (quite willingly) got caught up in the maelstrom of hype that surrounded the iphone launch. It was almost funny seeing the photos of people trampling over each other desperate to get seat for Steve Job’s presentation and pumping their hands in the air and screaming at every announcement. It’s not as if I can claim to be any kind of bemused, detached observer either. I had engadget and macrumours frantically auto-refreshing every ten seconds in a state of minor rapture as tiny pieces of the future leaked out line by line.

It was like the geek world cup final-I felt like everyone in the office should be allowed to take the afternoon off. We could all crowd around a plasma, drinking beer and high fiving each other when one of our favourite rumours was finally revealed.

Funny thing is, it doesn’t even make me feel good. It’s not a positive thing, it’s like a mania, like there is this disease that I’ve picked up somewhere and I see people around who have it worse than me and it’s not attractive. But I do it anyway.

So I had to leave my auto-refresh-athon early cause I had to go see this guy, Scott Harrison, at (of all places) the Apple Store on Regent st. I arrived, half expecting to see hordes of rabid fans descending on the place to bow down in worship, and sat down to listen to his talk. It was quite a harrowing hour really, the photos he shows are hard to look at, just the most horrendous things that poverty can do to people. All the time, just behind me, a hundred imacs are glowing with the freshly updated apple website and yet the more I listened the less it mattered. All this other stuff, reality, pain and suffering, the amazing work of people like Scott, it’s an antidote to all the junk we fill our lives with. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with apple or cool new stuff or brands in general, it’s just how hard it can be trying to keep things in their place, trying to maintain a balance. Everything in moderation (except moderation itself) as my mother used to tell me.

As for the iphone-I love it, but I think it seems a bit rushed somehow, like they weren’t quite where they wanted to be but have announced it anyway. It’s something beautiful, but it’s not for me right now-in a couple of revisions they will have made it something ubiquitous and perfect and I, like everyone else, will need and treasure them. But more importantly it’s just an object I can use to communicate with people I love (and I can do that, imperfectly, already)

Jo Mango-The Antidote

Find out more abut the amazing Jo Mango here.

And Scott’s charity here.