The other day, in a café, I saw somebody using one of these phones. And I’ll admit it, I thought of it as “yeah, I kinda know they still exist, but…”

It’s worth mentioning that my friend and I had discussed history a little already when I saw the thing pop up a couple of tables away from us. My friend’s from England, I’m from Germany. Take a guess what part of history we were talking about.

A couple of hours later, after coming home, I found myself gravitating towards that corner in our basement office where I store my oldest images. I dug out pictures of my grandfather. He decided as a 14-year-old that he was going to spend his life fighting as a soldier.

I distinctly remember my grandpa of course. Sat on his lap, got candy from him when I got him his cigarettes. Stuff like that. He fought in the first World War and in the second World War. He fought for the bad guys during latter but also for a German emperor during the former.

An emperor! Not a computer game one, not a dictator of some kind, but a real-life freaking emperor – a European one to boot, and only two generations removed from me!

My grandpa ended his life as a pacifist, by the way. His grandson is a pacifist, too. But yeah, that Nokia phone is really, really olde-worlde…