I’ve always thought of mobile phones as the new cigarette but of course they’re much worse. Let me tell you then just how much I miss smoking cigarettes. On certain mornings when the music’s right and I’m having a cup of tea it’s like my soul is yearning. All the more so because I never ever give in.

I gave up smokes when my kids were born, but I’ve never been able to give up the mobile phone because I’ve never had one. These days it seems like it’s just about the most distinctive badge I wear. At home when the kids were old enough to beseech me I’d say nup, the mobile phone is a lame companion. I was such an annoying dad. I’d also say to other parents, “you don’t let your children cross the main road on their own so how come you pop them on the school bus every day with an unsupervised pocket-rocket of violence, ridicule and porn? You may well be helicopter parents,” I’d say, “but in this instance you’re behaving more like drunkards.”

A friend of ours says that whenever she’s in a conversation with her mates about their battles with screen addiction she tells the story about being up on top of Mount Buffalo with us last year. Innocently she went to go to the toilet near the chalet but just as she was about to go in she caught sight of a middle-aged man (me) inside the female toilet with an outsize iPad madly taking photos while muttering about “13 different kinds of endemic moth”. Smirking, she then informs her friends that “he tells anyone who’ll listen that he doesn’t have a mobile, as if he’s Thich Nhat Hanh or Lord Bloody Byron. But there he is with his stupid big tablet keeping law-abiding nomophobes from having a timely mountain wee.”

That same friend also once told me a little defensively that the iPad was “a large-print telephone for Boomers” but I reminded her you’d have to install a SIM card for it to be that. For me it’s a car stereo that doubles as a magnifying glass. So no, I wasn’t quite busted.

Neither though am I quite unassailable. I am in fact often hapless because of the phone I don’t have. Like last weekend when I had to speak at a town I’d never been to and wasn’t sure if I’d taken the right turn. I stopped at a takeaway in the closest town to ask a local for directions, as you do, or used to do. The young woman behind the bain marie looked at me confused. Eventually, having no doubt decided that I must be out of charge, she pointed down the road. “I think it’s down there, yes,” she said. “But I’m not sure and I’m not allowed on my phone behind the counter so I can’t check.” She confirmed she was a local, yes, but perhaps she was only really native to her phone.

My position is not exactly as it sounds though. I’m actually online on an almost daily basis. And here’s a confession. I do have a dumb-phone which I keep like a box of tissues in the glove box of the car just in case. It’s therefore a balance I want to strike, somewhere between the Amish and the Influencers. I suppose that’s what I’m spruiking. My instinct has always been that a mobile would ruin the balance.

One other thing while I’m here. From time to time I find myself conversing with other writers and have begun to note the growing numbers among them who are no longer able to read as they once did. Jeepers, if the writers of books now suffer from the mangled cadence brought on by constant lame companionship then maybe these new AI authors we keep hearing about will actually stand a chance. I mean, no one’s asking them to read Proust-length sentences. And if I go to one more event and have to look at the person in front of me scrolling through their “socials” I think I too will take to a cork-lined room to write a 3000-page selfie.

Truth is, if I’m feeling disconnected and want to go somewhere to bump into somebody I’ll head to the ramparts of any of our most important universities, precisely because they’re the places where nearly everyone is not looking where they’re going. Sure, their faces may well be bright and illuminated but they have absolutely no clue what’s up ahead.

Oops, sorry, excuse me. Do any of us?

Gregory Day’s most recent book, Southsightedness, was published in April.