Everybody has a smartphone these days. I don’t. And I have no intention of getting one, even though I kind of like our iPads, especially for long car trips, or for that “dead time” up in the bedroom waiting for Adrian to fall asleep.

Everybody has a smartphone, and it’s always in their hands. In the train station, half the people are blipping on their phones, playing whatever latest game they have. Once on the train, even more people take their phones out. Eyes down, no contact with the world around them.

Friends sitting at a café, next to each other, each one with a phone in their hands. Mums on the train with their babies, ignoring the baby’s talk and even cries, blipping on their phones.

In the street you can easily spot them from a distance: it’s the people who are walking slightly too slowly, absent-mindedly, not quite in a straight line, getting in others’ way because they don’t even look up to see where they’re going.

I am by now so fed up with seeing this incessant phone-blipping everywhere that, by extension, I am fed up with the idea of smartphones. I feel a twinge of distaste when I think of them.

You could say that it’s not the phone’s fault. It’s the people using the phone. But at the same time it is inherent in technology that it changes our behaviour. Smartphones are made to be always with you, always on, always offering that titbit of entertainment, of distraction. The constant blipping is part of the soul of the smartphone.

For the same reason I resisted buying a car for many years. Owning a car changes your behaviour. Yes, it enables lots of new things, good things, nice things – but there is no denying that now that we own a car, we cycle much less.

Once you have acquired this subtly life-changing technology, it weasels its way into your habits, and will be difficult to get rid of. You own the thing, and the thing owns you. Even though I don’t like owning a car, I would not get rid of ours, now that we have it.

Or perhaps this is just general age-related Luddism. All these new-fangled gadgets! Kids these days! Etc etc.