Let’s begin this week with a quick thank you. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the plight of the Rocketship Bookshop, Salisbury’s independent children’s bookstore and asked readers to help.

Turns out that some people do read this column after all, as the shop went on to have a good week and avert their immediate crisis. So to all of those who went in to buy a book, thank you!

The power of traditional media, it seems, is still alive. 

Last weekend, Salisbury was lucky to witness one of those rare weather events, when the Northern Lights went south and were visible across Wiltshire.

I don’t want to spend the whole column referring back to previous columns, but back in November, I did flag how such sightings might be possible in the coming months thanks to a current eleven-year cycle of solar activity nearing its peak.

Even so, the geomagnetic storm that caused them was particularly unusual, making the lightshow a once-in-several-decades event to witness.

Except … I didn’t actually see them. With uncanny timing I’d booked to go abroad for a short mini-break.

As a result, I missed both the Northern Lights and the brief blast of warm weather: I set off and returned in rain.

Overseas, I scrolled under cloudy skies through my social media feeds of friends posting stunning pictures. And while I had a great time away, it was hard not to feel that I had missed out.

 The concept of FOMO – the fear of missing out – was first thought of in the late 1990s, with the term invented in the early 2000s.

Which isn’t to say that the idea didn’t exist before, but reached consciousness with the rise of, first, the Internet, and secondly, the use of smartphones.

Back in the day, that sense of missing out was less prevalent, because you weren’t being pinged every five minutes about what everyone else was doing.

 Research released this week by the More in Common think tank reveals the extent to which we are reliant on our phones. A whopping 44 per cent of UK adults look at their phones every hour.

That’s more than the US (41 per cent), France (29 per cent) or Germany (25 per cent).

There’s a clear link here with social media: only half of Germans have an active account, compared to 83 per cent of the UK.

An event like the Northern Lights is there to be enjoyed in the moment. For those lucky enough to witness, I hope you took the time to put your phone down and just watch.

Because it’s one thing to regret not being there, but quite another to be there and not soak up the experience. That strikes me as really missing out.