When God watched the last programme in David Attenborough’s magnificent series, Life On Earth, as He presumably did, He must have chuckled wryly at the title that had been chosen. It was: The Compulsive Communicator, and it referred to homo sapiens.

The year was 1979, and the Almighty, gazing into the crackling, handset-strewn, antenna-infested future that humankind had scarcely begun to imagine for itself, must have been minded to lean down from the heavens and whisper in Sir David’s ear, “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.

For whereas people then were at the mercy of what we now dismissively call landlines if they were to indulge their compulsion to communicate, they are now at the mercy of each other. Numbers that once signified places now signify individuals. Individuals carry mobiles, almost without exception (55 million subscribers in this nation of 60 million souls), and the default setting of a mobile, increasingly, is “on”. We text to the point of repetitive strain injury. We talk until there is nothing left to talk about. Microwave static is the soundtrack to our lives.

Well, almost. To the extent that mobile telephony has transformed society (see T2 today), it must be counted more revolutionary than Marxism. It has also forced phone booths to recast themselves as oases of sheltered calm for mobile users and enabled parents to keep track of errant children as never before. Could this be why Russell Crowe, the professional actor and amateur hellraiser, apparently forswore it at the Mercer Hotel, New York, whence he supposedly tried to call home on a landline? Next time, Mr Crowe, use a mobile telephone.