You are a telephone company. Work with me on this. It's a rhetorical device. You are a telephone company. If I was saying “you are a deep-sea diver” or “you are an eagle” you'd leap at the idea, I know you would. So humour me. You are a telephone company.

In fact, you are a German telephone company. Don't panic. It's just like the telephone company you were imagining you were before, only probably with more cold, haughty shouting. More faintly sinister technicians in rimless spectacles, fewer mono-syllabic, half-arsed teenagers who take three weeks to come round “some time between eight and five” so they can accidentally give you the same phone number as the local massage parlour. At least, this is what I assume about German telephone companies. I've never actually used one. I certainly haven't been one. Not like you.

My point here, or at least the very beginning of it, is that you are this entire telephone company. The whole thing. You are those faintly sinister technicians, you are the telephone numbers, you are the fibre-optic lines. When there is cold, haughty shouting, this is part of you, shouting at yourself. You are the management, you are the itemised phone bills. To paraphrase Chaka Khan, who really wasn't talking about this kind of thing at all, “it's all in you”.

But, alas. You are a German telephone company with big problems. You are losing customers, and your management culture has gone tits-up (Bruste nach oben, you'd probably call it). Worse still, lots of sensitive German telephone information keeps appearing in newspapers, and you don't know where it is coming from. Most likely, a great many faintly sinister technicians in rimless spectacles are coldly and haughtily shouting themselves hoarse. And thus, tits up and profits down, arse hanging open to the wind (Arsch geöffnet zum Wind), you hit on a plan.

You decide to keep tabs on yourself. You see, when bits of you are speaking to the press without the knowledge of the rest of you, they are using other bits of you to do so. They are your staff and they are making calls that use your telephones, which run on your telephone lines and are itemised in your bills, to talk about your business. So, you decide to look at those telephone records (which are yours) to see who called whom, and when. Then you look at the newspapers and see what stories these phone calls might have brought about. You probably think you've got them over a barrel. (ber einem Fa). In fact you've just, well, ber den eigenen Cornflakes gepisst. Although you probably don't eat cornflakes. You probably prefer some kind of sausage.

You are Deutsche Telekom. This is what has just happened. Last weekend the company admitted that, between 2005 and 2006, it commissioned private detectives to go through the telephone records of journalists and members of its own supervisory board. Germany is in uproar. It's the latest in a longish string of faintly boring cases of German firms allegedly spying on their own staff. In March Lidl, the supermarket group, was forced to deny that it had used secret cameras to spy on its employees. In April the magazine Stern alleged that Daimler-Chrysler had questioned in-house doctors about workers' health and lifestyle. That was denied, too. Still, Der Spiegel reports that more than one German office computer in three is electronically monitored. There is a growing culture of people looking at people.

Deutsche Telekom, though, is an interesting one, mainly because it did so little. Again, it didn't bug anybody. It didn't follow anybody or break into anybody's home. It didn't even check out anybody's Facebook page. It just collated information that was already its own. It's not clear whether anything criminal took place at all. And yet, unquestionably, what they did was wrong. Why? There is a lot of legal fuzz here, what with German telecommunication secrecy laws, and the mind-spinning circular question of whether a company can break a law by revealing something to itself.

Look, you're the German telephone company around here. You probably know more about this than I do. I'm more interested in the general blurry notion behind it all - the growing trend of us all having endless information about each other and having to pretend that we don't.

It's like when somebody e-mails you by mistake. In your human capacity, I mean, not your German telephone company capacity. You'll always read it to the end, right? Although it makes you feel a little grubby? We're just not sure whether it's our information or not. I can't figure out what the future holds. Will we get better at judging this kind of thing? Or will everything be out there, on display, to the extent that we no longer need to? When somebody I don't know e-mails me, I tend to Google-stalk them. Not a lot, but enough. If they're sending me a story about a minor celebrity doing something slightly interesting that involves a major celebrity, I'll want to check that they don't work in public relations (they usually do). But if my searches reveal other embarrassing details, such as that they are Cliff Richard fans, or dog breeders, or devoted signatories to websites extolling the virtues of S&M (or even, I suppose, M&S), I'll keep this to myself. It's not relevant. It's not polite. It would make me look weird.

But maybe, pretty soon, it will be expected. Maybe we'll give up on privacy altogether, and the idea of keeping a phone call from our employers, or anybody, will seem nothing short of subversive, in the manner of Brave New World. Maybe I'll be trailing my digital footprints at the bottom of every e-mail, in a manner that tells you everything about me. Possibly, you would even be able to see how I managed to get all that accurate German up there. Because personally, I can barely speak a word.

Who do you think I am? A German telephone company?

Inventosaurus

Every man has a favourite dinosaur. Seriously. It's a big secret. And it's never the tyrannosaurus rex. Any guy who says that is just patronising you. He thinks you won't have heard of any others.

I'm quite partial to the plates that the stegosaurus had on its back, and I love the way the triceratops was basically an Elizabethan rhino, but my favourite has always been the iguanodon. I couldn't tell you why, exactly. He had four legs but spent a lot of time on two. You know the one? Spiky thumbs. To be honest, I preferred him the old way, when he had only the one thumb spike and they thought it went on his nose.

That's the great thing about dinosaurs. Nobody has a clue. It's all made up. For all we know they could have been covered in purple feathers and made noises like bagpipes. One decade's knee is the next decade's nose. We don't know their arses from their elbows.

Take the azhdarchid pterosaur. He's one of the big flying ones. Or so we thought. But now they reckon he might have actually walked around, on his feet and wristy bits. “This bizarrely stiff neck has previously been a problem for other ideas,” says one scientist, warily. Pah! Bizarrely stiff neck? Get away. It's a tail, or a fifth leg, or the inside of his nose! Mystery Lego! Brilliant!

Crisis? What crisis?

This fuel business. I'm a bit lost. Stop me if I'm misunderstanding something hugely obvious here, but I was under the impression that the Government had a plan to cut emissions. Get people out of their cars and on to public transport. Get freight off the motorways and on to trains and suchlike. Right? So costs go up, and people can't afford to drive their lorries and cars. Why the sudden crisis? More to the point, where have all the environmentalists gone? Isn't this what they wanted? Where are the Greens and the Lib Dems? Where is the greenie-blue David Cameron? Cat got his tongue?

Times Recommends

• Strip away the figleaf and reveal naysayers
• Dave’n’George: there may be trouble ahead
• I do not accept that £64,000 a year for politicians is peanuts