Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

A few people contacted me after I posted before about phone fraud, asking whether I was suggesting that Mobile Phone Xchange was a scam.

Just to let you know, I was not suggesting that Mobile Phone Exchange was a scam, merely stating that it’s hard to tell these days which online companies are legitimate or not.

In any case, I’ve now sent in my old Nokia N95 to Mobile Phone Exchange, and I’ll be able to report on my progress here as to whether the company is legitimate or not.

Obviously, I would not even consider sending my old phone in if I was uncertain, but as I was considering sending it in for recycling anyway, I thought now would be as good a time as any to test things out directly myself.

I can go a year without watching tennis, then sit down for Wimbledon and enjoy every moment of it.

It’s a sport that lends itself to the casual fan. It’s a beautiful sport, often a mesmerising sport: anyone can appreciate Roger Federer’s pinpoint precision and poetic skill.

But there is no Federer here. And although that makes it less exciting in a way, I’m hoping it will still be exciting here, with these two players.

As I’m writing, the Wimbledon final is underway, and I’m hoping it’s going to be a thrilling game. It’s a little bit strange not to have Roger Federer in it: he limped out against Thomas Berdych earlier in the competition – and it will be interesting to see if it will be a passing of the torch moment, like when Federer trumped Sampras all those years ago.

There’s something thoroughly entertaining about Nadal. He plays with such intensity, such fire; a steely determination to never give up, never allow a single point to slip away. He literally plays every point as if he were against match point. And yet, he has such endurance that you have to think the longer the game goes, the more it favours him.

Berdych is a relative unknown. Although he if he wins, he will be the first person to ever win the title having gone through the top three players in the world to do so.

There are some famous faces in the crowd, too, and you can see why: it’s a fantastic event. The sun is shining, there are strawberries and cream and offer, and tennis is a game that you don’t have to follow to appreciate.

John Carlin in The Sunday Times today has written a fantastic piece that perfectly highlights England’s shortcomings as a football team.

He interviewed Spanish ace Xabi Alonso about why England failed so miserably at the World Cup, who said, very eloquently, that the 11 best does not make the best 11.

Yes, we can litter our team with world-beaters and Champions League heroes, Premiership champions and footballers of the year; but ultimately, it is not a team.

To make a team, you design it, and design it with specific players and their specific skills in mind. You do not get the 11 best players and force them into a position and a system that they’re not used to. You don’t force them to play in these unfamiliar ways, because, as we have seen, they will play like strangers.

England have played like strangers for so long that it has become the norm – to get better, to make it into a further stage of the World Cup than the last 16, we need to break the mould.

When Germany were thrashing England the other day, the commentator said: how many of these German players would you swap for the England team? He was talking, of course, about the supposed brilliance of our individual players.

But Germany are a brilliant team. They play with the fearlessness of youth, and they play like they are enjoying themselves. And they are now in the semi-finals after destroying Argentina in a similar fashion to the way they dismantled England.

It is not about the individuals: it is about how they co-exist, how they play together, how they string passes and think and work as a unit out on the field.

I just hope that England learn their lesson, and learn it quickly.

Jobs: tricky things. Slippery, elusive – at least in these times.

When I first came out of university, there was barely a job to go around. In the arts field, the creative field, there were even less than many of the other areas; and it made it relatively impossible to find the sort of work I wanted to find.

Now, with my post-graduate course drawing to a close, I’m having to look around at jobs that I can apply for when it finishes. And I had better start now I suppose. After all, it’s better to get the applications in as early as possible than to wait for a few weeks.

Doing the extra course was partly because of that. And, partly, it was so I could separate myself a little more from the next batch of hopefuls graduating and flooding the market.

And while it strikes me that the job market is a lot better this summer than it was last year, it’s still, inevitably, going to be hard to get a job.

So this time I’m approaching it with a different mindset. This time I’m happy to do anything, at least at first. Mostly anything, anyway. Even if it means using the old elbow grease and doing basic office cleaning work.

At least until something more my preferred thing comes along. That way, I can be earning something and not just sitting around doing nothing, and I can at least maintain something of a social life.

Who knows – maybe something ideal will spring up just in time for the course to finish?

It’s fully possible to recycle mobile phones. I’ve seen many offers over the years enticing me to sell my own mobile for mobile phone recycling – and it couldn’t be more easy to take these companies up on their offers.

And yet, there are a number of old mobile phones lying about the house at the moment. To see them piled up with the dirty laundry or with dusty, forgotten CD’s is a bit of a shame.

It’s quite easy to recycle them. In many cases, they send you a package, which you slip the phone into and post back to them. And then you get paid. It’s really as simple as that.

I don’t expect mine is the only house with old mobiles left lying around, so it begs the question – why? Why don’t people take more care to sell or dispose of their old or broken phones in a green and reliable manner?

We live in a society that is obsessed with recycling: there are about four different bins on my road for whatever rubbish might accumulate over the course of a week or two. Food rubbish, plastic, cardboard – the list goes on.

And people have taken to the multi-bin approach very well. People recycle their waste and their drink bottles enthusiastically.

So what is it about phones? When I bought my new phone, it even came with a recyclable plastic bag to put my old model in, so there really is no excuse.

Perhaps it’s a matter of publicity. It’s a bit of a struggle to find any stories about recycling services in the news; I suppose it’s entirely reliant on people being proactive and finding out about what’s on offer.