IN the ‘good old days’ you wrote to someone, popped the letter in the post box and the postman delivered it. If you were lucky in about a week you received a reply. Now, you send someone an instant message, you can see when they’ve read it and you can tell whether they are sending you a reply or ignoring you.

When I was a teenager, we queued up to use the phone in the hall (the coldest room in the house). After a few minutes, a parent would appear, hover, sigh loudly, and eventually comment in a loud voice, designed to be heard by the caller the other end, that you’d been on the phone long enough; time to come off. Using the phone was a privilege; a scarce resource that needed rationing and to be kept free for emergencies.

95 per cent of young people own a smart phone; acquired, typically, aged eight. On average we spend 24 hours a week looking at it; young people double that.

The ‘good old days’ weren’t particularly good. Debating whether the benefits of modern life outweigh their harm is pointless. Technology confers both. We just have to accept that life today is different.

Recently, though, three things made me think a little more deeply about how I use my phone.

The first, a conference at school for parents drew my attention to the chief medical officer’s recent advice that children should have a screen free hour before going to bed. Ok, so their brains are still developing and need a little more protection, but parenting is about modelling not commanding. So hard to resist one final glimpse before turning the light out!

The second, a walk on Monday through the Forest with friends and their children. The rain threatened, the children protested, the ground was muddy and the inclosure dank, dark and uninviting. Phones were banned (apart from the walking app we were following…) After a few minutes, the grumbling subsided. The children chatted; adults too. We enjoyed the peace, stillness and silence. We glimpsed deer through the trees, rain on the leaves and clouds in the sky. As we left behind the technological babel in which we live most of lives we rediscovered a real world, real life and real communication.

And finally, I was struck by the irony of the cacophony of comment on social media directed at a young mother who, at 19 had already lost two children and wished to return home to her family; a victim of online grooming and seduction while still a child directed through the same unregulated and unrepentant online platforms that now carried her judgement and condemnation.

The final choice about how we use our phones and the world they reveal to us, is ours alone.