BECAUSE I was due to go away this week, not holidaying, I'll have you know, but working up here in Axminster, I thought I'd better get my mobile telephone charged and ready to go. That was last Tuesday and I couldn't find it. I could have sworn it was in the bottom of my handbag, because I couldn't remember ever taking it out, but after a thorough search, which with my handbag is a brave thing to do, it was not amongst the hundred and one other items which are stored in what is known in the house as the pink hole of Calcutta. I looked in all the more obvious places. Bedside table, all my other bags, bathroom and loo (although I'm never sure it's quite nice to make telephone calls from either, especially the latter, so it was an unlikely place to find it). I also searched my desk at work and the car. It wasn't until the weekend that I had time to do a thorough dragnet of the house, without success. I found quite a lot of other things, including inevitably two pairs of nail scissors, but no telephone. Then I had a brainwave. I'd dial the number and listen for a muffled ring. I should have thought of this before, because years ago I spent some considerable time in a field looking for someone's pager which had been dropped. Whoever passed by must have thought I had gone completely mad, or was looking for some kind of mushroom, as I walked round the field bent double peering into hedges. I never found it. Sadly, when I'd found my number there was no ringing sound, just a recorded announcement saying that the telephone was no longer in service. Muttering that it wasn't it service because I couldn't find the darned thing I nearly gave up. Then my daughter said she had seen it somewhere and produced it from a windowledge in the hall. I was so grateful I didn't even voice one tiny suspicion, as I usually do, when something I've been searching for for ages suddenly turns up in an unlikely and very public place which I'm sure I've searched before. But there it was, back in the bag, sinking like a stone to the bottom, and in need of charging which meant another search for the right charger. We've got about a dozen of these things hanging around, none of which fit the latest phone. Why they can't just be a standard issue I don't know, but I expect there's some highly technical reason to do with profit making on the part of charger makers. All this fuss just so I can have a working mobile telephone in the bottom of the pink hole of Calcutta which I don't use, don't want to use and can't see why other people have major panic attacks over if they haven't got the wretched things within easy reach of their hands. Yes, I know they're useful, especially in an emergency. I do, however, have a sneaky feeling that if there was an emergency I would either find mine had run out of juice or more likely that I couldn't remember how to get it off 'keypad locked'. Having once, as I'm sure you'll remember if you are a regular reader of this column, telephoned someone from my handbag (not the pink hole, I think it was kind of pale beige) and blocked their telephone for hours because I hadn't had the phone keypad locked and by dropping something else heavy into the bag had hit their number. So, hanging upside down in my car, I would be in no state to remember whether you press the little green telephone top left and the little star button bottom left or vice versa. What I want to do is yell 'I remember when all we had at home was a black bakelite telephone firmly attached by a black cord to the wall which never got lost, never needed topping up with money and didn't take your picture, read your fortune or play an inane tune when it rang. And guess what? The world ran perfectly fine without mobile phones. Not only that, people managed to get their shopping done without having to ring home and ask 'do you want sprouts for dinner or will broccoli do?' or call 53 times from a traffic jam to say they've moved five yards, or ring from some faraway beach and tell their lucky colleagues that they're just having their fifth lunchtime cocktail and the temperature is in the eighties. It's communication overload, and as for texting, it's turning our younger generation into people who talk in single letters, can't spell because they don't need to, and don't use either grammar or punctuation marks. Actually, come to think of it, our modern education system has already done that.

One of the nicest things about being in Axminster is that the office is right across the road from a butcher's shop which produces a wondrous range of things and I think it may be the end of the road for my search for the perfect sausage. Say what you like, there's nothing to beat a good old British banger. You can keep your fancy foreign ones, full of garlic, and bits and pieces of unidentifiable beasts. You can forget low fat, low cholesterol, low in taste things which pose as sausages in supermarkets. Give us a beautifully made butcher's sausage full of flavour and made by an expert. In every town I've ever lived I've tried to find the ultimate sausage, and to a certain extent succeeded. Then, inevitably, either me or my husband would mention this to friends and before you knew it you were buying pounds of the things for other people and turning into a middleman for the sausage industry. There was a time that, having read a book about making your own sausages, I decided to have a go and got a bit obsessed. It all sounded so easy. First you get a sausage making attachment for your mincer, then you buy sausage skins, then you buy a mincer attachment to mince the meat if you didn't have one on your food mixer, and I hadn't, and then you just churn out pounds of sausages flavoured with anything you want. I bought the mincer first, then sent off for the sausage making attachment which was surprisingly expensive considering it consisted of a long plastic tube which looked a bit like something a doctor would use to carry out unmentionable examinations of your person. I then started the long search for sausage skins which were apparently like gold dust. Early sausage makers used to use intestines which they presumably had to pull so that they ended up fairly thin, but you can't just go in and ask for a pound of pig's intestines, not after all those food scares you can't. I eventually pleaded with a butcher for just a few skins in exchange for buying all the meat and pork fat and he handed over a long string of rather nasty looking pinkish white stuff which looked like thin surgical stockings. Suffice to say I didn't find sausage making easy. The recipes weren't particularly difficult but getting the skins filled was. I would end up with a pile of objects which either looked like little badly stuffed pillows or several which got away from me and were a two feet long. Some were so thin that you could hardly dare call them chipolatas, some so fat they resembled haggis. I tried filling one long string of skin to make a 15 footer sausage then twisting them into equal lengths, but then the filling just fell out of the end. The book said you had to fill one bit, then twist, then fill another, but I didn't seem to have enough hands to guide the sausage meat into the skins while turning the handle of the micer. I The family, of course, quickly got fed up with having my failures for every meal, mainly because they all seemed to explode in the pan (the book said this was because they were too full) but if they weren't full they imploded and looked like little burned flannels. Eventually, to everyone's relief, I ran out of sausage skins and didn't buy any more. I secretly had to admit that firstly they tasted nothing like a good butcher's sausage and secondly that with the cost of all the equipment, the skins and the ingredients, each failed sausage was coming out at around £2 each. Which for a humble banger is just a bit too much.