In the wilderness (last night, 11.45pm)

For the first time in years, I am totally without communication. I am on a train, late at night, going to a rural train station to drive home. My phone battery is flat. And it's terrifying. What if the train breaks down? What if the car breaks down? How did I reach this state of dependency?

At university and even for the first year of working, I didn't have a mobile phone. I didn't have an e-mail address. In years to come I'm sure my son will find this impossible to imagine. I got my first phone aged 22. SO what did we do in those dark ages before the light found us? Well. We made plans and kept to them. We applied logic. If we were meeting somewhere with unpredictable timings, we made contingencies. And I confess I spent a lot less time worrying about not being contactable than I do now. With hindsight, I felt free. And yet this mobile technology is supposed to be helping us to be living our lives to the full, be able to run our lives from anywhere in the world. But the question is- why on earth would you want to?

I am the first person to see the values in being easily contacted. And yet it seems to have bred a laziness, an inability to think logically around every day problems. If there is a moment's delay, impatience kicks in. Because technology is there, we use it, even when we really don't need to. The minute anything gets hard or uncertain, we can find out the answer straight away. Stuck on a crossword clue? There's a website for that. Can't find the pub you're meeting your mate at? There's a phone service or GPS application for that. Make a cup of coffee? Well OK, there's not yet an app for that, but you take the point. When did it become necessary for everything from information to entertainment to be so damn available? Perhaps we SHOULD have to wait for things, perhaps we SHOULD have to figure a few things out for ourselves, or be allowed to be out without a phone and just get home when we said we would. We wonder why children are ungrateful, why they don't appreciate the value of information or presents. With the internet there ready to answer in seconds the most complex question they may have, communication instantly by IM, text, e-mail, can we really be surprised that the nation is becoming more and more impatient? If the workplace didn't have e-mail, imagine how much less stressful your day would be. Just because we have technology and communication at our fingertips – it doesn't necessarily mean we should always be using it.