IT HAS TAKEN more than a half-century to get there, but at last I have become a member of a minority, subject to an all-in package of suffering and misery and persecution commonly triggered by the strains of Beethoven's Fifth, the "William Tell Overture" or "Dixie" as played by an electronic dwarf.

Don't get me wrong. Each of these is among my musical favorites. But each ceases to be music to soothe the fevered brow and becomes a raucous racket to inflame one's instincts to murder, or at least to mayhem that won't be forgotten anytime soon, when its tinny notes are the signal for a mobile phone user to answer the blasted thing.

In my ever-lengthening list of the Devil's Own Tools, the cellphone ranks at or near the top, although a case could be made for bottles with "childproof" caps that need a trained physicist to open, or "long-life" batteries with the staying power of a mayfly, or those metal ice trays that strip the skin off your fingertips when you try to get the cubes out.

(I'm also not totally enamored with that plastic stuff that supermarkets feel duty-bound to use to wrap perishables like lemons and bratwurst and ham slices, ostensibly to make them germ-proof. It also makes them human-proof, with the result that you either need a brain surgeon's fingers to separate the cheese slabs or you do without Welsh rarebit).

But I digress. The subject is the cellphone, the proliferation of which has made it a sort of plastic version of the Black Plague, the main difference being that you have a choice of colors. Anyone of any age can get one, once they are potty-trained, can get around on two legs and learn to count from 1 to 9 on a phone pad.

In Britain, it is now official - more than half of the population now own a cellphone. That means more than 30 million people, a truly horrifying figure that was reached by the sale of one phone every two seconds between April and June. For those who failed the 1-to-9 test, that's 38,500 cellphones a day.

Where there is a majority, of course, there is a corresponding minority. Of which, in this case, I am quite happily a member, because as far as owning a cellphone is concerned, I would rather scrub my scrotum with a cheese grater.

I am not alone. Fellow journalist James Bartholomew once owned one but no longer, thanks to a bandit who noticed his on the front seat of his car, promptly smashed a window and stole it. "The thief was clearly the agent of a Greater Power who wanted to liberate me," he concluded.

When they first became popular - really only about five years ago, although it seems a ghastly century or more - cellphones were considered symbols of prestige and power, suggesting the owner was well-to-do, upwardly mobile and a potential, and sometimes real, mover and shaker in world affairs.

No longer. Today, as James Bartholomew aptly puts it, the mobile phone "is not a badge of honor - it is a badge of servitude."

Just so. This wretched invention has done to privacy and independence what dogs do to fire hydrants. If you tote one around, there is no way to get away from a boss who wants to tell you to get back to the office, no diving into an obscure bar to avoid a wife who wants you should pick up the brats from school, no relief from disembodied voices demanding charity donations, that tenner they loaned you, or payment of the phone bill.

Minorities are always persecuted in some fashion, and non-cellphone owners are no different. We still have to listen to the Lone Ranger's theme music seeping from some fool's jacket midway through the second act of "The Barber of Seville," or a pimply pre-pubescent on a bus whispering nauseous nothings to his girlfriend at 117 decibels.

To be sure, you are occasionally treated to a cellphone performance so odious as to nearly warrant admiration for sheer audacity. Such as the Flash Harry aboard a suburban train in London calling first his wife ("Train's stuck and I'll be a couple of hours late, dear"), then his mistress ("I've got us an hour, darling - pick me up at the station").

But most - like, 99 percent - of cellphone calls that I am unfortunate enough to overhear manage to take the adjective "banal" to previously unplumbed depths, broken only by the caller's occasional panic (and music to his listener's ear): "What? What's that?. . . Huh? You're breaking up! Wha. . .? Oh, ---- it!"

I must inject a note of clarification here. I said I didn't own one of these dreadful instruments, which is true. But that's not to say the Webb household is a cellphone-free zone. My wife Elizabeth packs one, and persuading her to give it up would be about as easy as teaching Swahili to a duck-billed platypus.

Elizabeth is, in fact, the very sort of person Alexander Graham Bell probably had in mind when he picked up the phone, made that first call, told his assistant, "Watson, come here, I need you," and started the world's communications trend toward what some describe today as a "global village." I call it a "telecoms ghetto," but I'm awkward that way.

She and her friend Frances keep British Telecom's profits ticking over with Olympic-class phone chats that would put the best filibustering efforts of Senator J. Strom Thurmond's halcyon days to shame. (I peeked in once, suspecting they were reading the London telephone directory to each other, but no.)

So this is a telephonically divided household. I loathe phone conversations and installed an answerphone at home, so I could monitor incoming calls and decide whether I wanted to talk with the caller. She, on the other hand, does a creditable imitation of a fullback on a goal line drive over left guard every time the thing rings.

In truth, the telephone is to Elizabeth what a seaside cliff is to a lemming or the floor is to the buttered side of toast.

I ponder this on occasion. I also ponder over what the world would be like today if, when Al Bell made that phone call, Thomas Watson had been down at the pub buying drinks, safe in the knowledge that the boss couldn't reach him.

Thought for the Week: If a halo falls a few inches, it is called a noose.

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