A word from the Editor: There is something nightmarish about the power gadgets exert on us

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Our lives do not have to, and should not, revolve around mobile phones

It was a wonderful evening: two hours of superlative dance, accompanied by Tchaikovsky's music, with the luminously beautiful American ballerina Sarah Lamb in the main female role of Tatiana.

But I was also fascinated by events offstage.

I don't go to the ballet or the opera very often so I was curious about how the audience would behave.

Having become more than a bit jaded by the irritating antics of theatre and cinema-goers I found myself waiting, during the performance, for the first ballet lover to pull out their pesky "smart" phone and peer at the illuminated screen.

To my delight and surprise not one of the people nearby did and I would not describe the crowd at the ROH as being any different to the average attendees at a theatre.

According to my colleague, Sunday Express dance critic Jeffery Taylor, it was almost impossible some years back to get through the bar of the opera house for all the fur-clad women.

A bit like trying to get to Narnia through that wardrobe full of coats.

But apart from one elderly lady in mink and a hat, and an old gentleman swathed in silk scarves and encrusted with foreign medals, the audience looked like you and me: smartly dressed middle-class folk on a night out.

So is there, I wonder, the breath of change in the air?

Are we all becoming just a bit more responsible in our use of mobile phones?

There was much discussion of the subject on Chris Evans's show on Radio 2 last week as Apple announced the biggest quarterly net profit in history, an extraordinary £11.8billion.

Good luck to Apple, I suppose, but I have never understood the fascination with mobile phones or any sort of phones for that matter.

I grew up in a house with no phone at all, trooping up to the old red kiosk at the end of the road on the rare occasions when I needed to make a call.

I must have been 15 or 16 when we had our first telephone put in.

My mother wanted to be able to contact our doctor quickly if my father, who was manic depressive, shifted into a "high" mood and began being disruptive.

A few weeks after it was installed he did indeed take a turn for the worse.

As my mum tried quietly to make her call my dad dashed down the stairs and wrenched the phone and its lead out of the wall.

He was high and he was happy that way.

Mobiles are brilliant gadgets but they are not everything

He didn't want to be helped.

We struggled on without a phone, my mum writing endless and surprisingly effective letters to the hospital and, somehow, I think the notion that you don't really need to keep calling people was planted in my mind.

Letters to this day still have their own exclusive power to cajole and persuade, face-to-face communication even more so.

Mobiles are brilliant gadgets but they are not everything.

Our lives do not have to and should not revolve around them, especially when their use can be so disruptive and divisive.

If the discussions I have been hearing on the radio and among my friends are anything to go by that message may finally be getting through.

My daughter and her friends who are all 15 have at last had enough of their mobiles getting between them and put their phones away when they are together.

A fellow on the radio said that he had a rule at home which he calls NTATT (No Technology At The Table).

This will strike a chord with anyone who has seen those sad couples in a restaurant who stare at their phones and don't utter a word to each other all night.

One of my friends goes a stage further, insisting when she invites friends to her house they leave their mobiles on the hall table.

"But what if my baby-sitter calls?" one of them wailed.

"You'll hear it," my friend pointed out.

If we have gained a lot through the invention of the mobile phone how much more have we lost?

Those lovely, free-flowing, laughter-filled conversations of old around a big table in a kitchen or restaurant, those priceless, never-to-be-repeated exchanges with our children as they grow up and slowly become alive to the world in their own unique way.

The phone has become the evil and intrusive stranger forever tapping us on the shoulder and whispering: "Ignore your family, talk to me, you won't know what I have to tell you unless you do."

There is something nightmarish about the power these gadgets exert over us.

One final caller to the radio was a teacher who said that as a result of constant phone use by themselves and their parents to the exclusion of all other communication she was now taking charge of three-year-olds who did not know how to speak.

Is any of this worth £11.8billion?

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