Wires are annoying, but wild electricity is far more frightening.

Wires. We hate wires. They are an unsightly, tangled canker on the knee of technology, trailing across floors and walls and pets in their quest to connect electrical things to other electrical things and foster some kind of reciprocal interaction between them.

We once had a fling with a girl who liked wires. "I find wires really sexy," she said, downing a vodka in our bedroom at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon. We'd not heard that before and we've never heard it since - we suspect we never will because it's clearly mental - but we obliged by tying her to a chair with a PlayStation 2. One joypad for each arm, power cable for the left leg and SCART lead for right. We should have taken the opportunity to have a go on Grand Theft Auto while she was incapacitated, but the whole scene was surreal enough as it was.

"Nice one, Nokia. Stick to the Moon in future."We wish we felt the same about wires. Well, we don't really wish that, otherwise we'd spend all our time rolling orgasmically round the living room floor covered in the things instead of doing important stuff like playing Call of Duty and eating cheesecake. In fact we wish we didn't need wires at all. It's all very well having data floating about in mid-air via wireless networks, but that doesn't stop the great clump of plastic worms congregating at the business end of your telly, attracting dust and fluff and mice and bears.

Praise be, then, for Nokia. A team of crazed scientists in the company's lair on the Moon is developing a charging device which doesn't need to be plugged in. This futuristic process will harvest wild electricity from the air and shove it into your phone battery, pumping out enough juice to keep the little blighter running in standby mode for the rest of time. It's unlikely to be available for four or five years, but that's not very long these days. Everything goes a lot quicker in the modern world, even time.

There are good and bad sides to this technology. The good side is that it will take us one step closer to the wonderful dream of a wire free life. The bad side is that using it would require us to acknowledge the existence of great globs of electricity roaming around in the wild. That seems terrifying. Supposedly it's there because of the ambient radio waves produced by phone masts, radios, TVs and Wi-Fi, but knowing where it comes from doesn't make it any more palatable.

You know what it reminds us of? Yeast. Sourdough bread, which is very nice, is made by shoving a load of yoghurt and flour in a beaker and leaving that out to attract wild yeast. The bubbly mush which results - give or take a few weeks and some fiddly bits - gives the bread its distinctive taste. Very nice with marmalade, but also unnerving. We don't feel comfortable with the thought of gangs of yeast patrolling around the kitchen looking for yoghurt to mate with. What are they up to when they aren't copping off with dairy products?More articles like this
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We heard about wild yeast years ago and we've still not come to terms with it. Now they're telling us there's electricity lurking in the shadows too? Nice one, Nokia. Stick to the Moon in future.