“Can I just plug my charger in somwhere; my phone’s gone dead”.

No you can’t. Fuck off. You think electricity’s free? “Yes, of course you can, Michael, in fact let me make you a cup of tea and I’ll service your phone for you too; delete the obselete apps, enhance the screen, upgrade the battery and abuse your twitter account”.

Its a fact of life. Phones ‘die’. All the sodding time. The better they become, the more sophisticated, the more complex and all-consuming, the lower the battery life. All that R&D invested into making phones into computers, into control centres for people’s lives, and yet they’re all limited by the charge they can hold. “I can switch on my central heating at home from my phone, and record Eastenders and wash the car remotely, all from a new app”. No you can’t. Cos you’re battery’s dead.

I reckon we spend up to 87% of our lives with something or other ‘on charge’. Don’t ask me how I calculated that, you’re not bright enough to follow, just trust me, 87%.

Why can’t they just invent a new battery? One that is the size of a pound coin and could power a Prius for a month? In fact they could if they would just use nuclear power. But we’d all be dead from radiation poisoning as soon as we took the first pre-recorded call from Barlcays about our PPI claim. You can’t have it all.

Yet there are others with power issues too.

The quite amazing feat of landing a spacecraft onto the surface of a comet 317 million miles away (that’s measured from Marble Arch, presumably, if its from Sydney then deduct a bit… or add it on, depending on the time of year…). No-one’s done this before. Which I suppose is not a massive surprise. And it is a remarkable journey, which has taken 10 years and actually involved a traveled distance of over 2 billion miles. Not because they caught a cab and the driver conned them into a ‘short cut’ but because the craft had to go around gravitational fields of planets. And ended up in the right place at the right time and landed. Almost perfectly. Almost.

Because when the Philae landed on the comet’s surface, it ‘bounced’. Ooops. The bounce took several hours and the lander eventually came down next to a crater, in the shade of a cliff. A bit on its side. So its just like when your wife parks at Waitrose. But the problem is the ‘shade’ bit. Because the lander is solar powered. And in the shade there ain’t no sunshine. Michael Jackson told us that years ago. Prophet that he was. Or that Bill Withers was.

And this could be a modern tragedy. The most incredible feat of science thus far, fucked up by a flat battery. A metaphor for our times. And this is not just any old space project, but a proper, European one. Which, in this instance, and this one only, I’m prepared to include Britain as part of ‘European’. Don’t tell Nigel Farage.

Happy Friday; may your battery be permanently on 5 bars

A xxxx