You might as well ask to buy condoms in the Vatican as ask a mobile phone salesman for a low radiation mobile phone handset, says Geoffrey Lean.
If you want to know what it must have been like to be the central character in a Bateman cartoon, stroll into a mobile phone shop and ask – as I do from time to time – for a low-radiation handset.
“Sales executives” who can discourse for hours on WAP and GPRS, on megapixel cameras and MP3 players, on vibration alerts and polyphonic tones are struck speechless. They have no information, they are likely to tell you, and don’t know where to get it. And, if you are really unlucky, you will be lectured by some pimply post-pubescent – as I once was – on how absurd you are being, because there is no risk.