Rob’s Rants

Apple of my Eye

Fri, 8 Oct 2010 08:19:09 +0100

Well, my Apple TV finally arrived.

It missed Lord Jobs’ promised September deadline by six days, though it was theoretically ‘dispatched’ nine days earlier via an ‘upgraded shipping method’. Presumably, the upgraded shipping method involved some kind of disabled camel relay team who had to set off from a distant planet.

Still, it came, and it’s beautiful, of course, and tiny. Tiny and light. The chunkiest item in the package is the adaptor plug.

It was simplicity itself to set it up, though I have to admit, I was well prepared for it: I’d run an ethernet cable to the TV room from my router, and I’d got an HDMI switching hub already installed, and an HDMI cable – Apple don’t supply one – all waiting to go. The only cable option to connect your device to the TV is HDMI, so if you don’t have an HD television, you can’t hook up Apple TV.

The device can connect with your WiFi network, but a direct ethernet connection is considerably faster and more robust.

Plug the HDMI cable in at both ends, plug in the ethernet cable and the power, and you’re up and running.

You have to set up your computer(s) to share their content via iTunes. It takes just a couple of clicks on a Mac. The whole setup took just a few minutes.

You then have to enter your iTunes account name and password via the remote control, which is sleek and tiny and doesn’t have a keyboard, of course, making this part of the process a bit of a rigmarole. You have to scoot through a grid of about 80 letters and characters, selecting each one individually, so it pays to have a short password.

If you don’t have an ethernet connection, you have to join your WiFi network, which involves more scooting through the character grid. I don’t see how Apple could make this easier, but it’s an undeniable pain. Still, you only have to do it once.

I’m an earlier adopter. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an early adopter is an impatient idiot who buys technology before it actually works and pays a hefty premium for the privilege, only to see a cheaper, better version released onto the market a couple of months later. An early adopter installs overpriced faulty software onto his computer and then spends weeks of anguish and frustration trying to recover from the damage it inflicted on his system. An early adopter queues for six hours in a blizzard to get his frostbitten hands on exciting new hardware, even when there’s no-one else in the queue. Yes, I’m an early adopter. And I have the emotional scars to prove it.

In spite of this major character flaw, I never bought the first generation Apple TV. I wanted to, on many occasions, but I just couldn’t work out what it was for. It didn’t seem to do anything I couldn’t already do in several other ways. Play iTunes content on my TV? I could simply hook up my iPod/iPhone to the television, much, much more cheaply, and was already doing that.

What finally tempted me into making the purchase, besides the more accessible price point, was the option to rent movies and TV shows cheaply, directly to my television, and watch internet content in general. This, it strikes me, is the Future of TV.

The problem is: you can’t do any of that. Not in England. Not yet, at least. In America, TV shows are available from certain studios and networks for 99 cents. The studios and networks making their content available are, basically, Disney, and ABC, which is owned by Disney, which, strangely enough, has Steve Jobs as a major board member. The rest are balking at the price point.

Over here, Apple have precisely no-one on board. You can’t even access BBC iPlayer or Channel 4’s 4OD, which are free services. Since you can’t buy and store content on the new Apple TV, renting is the only option. And the number of TV shows available to rent? Precisely zero.

The latest movies are available as promised, but they cost a whopping £4.49. This is roughly comparable with renting from SKY Box Office, and considerably more expensive than renting from Blockbuster-like postal services with a monthly membership fee. True, you can’t actually guarantee getting a particular movie at a specific time via these postal services, but just how impatient can you be to see a movie? Older movies are even more ludicrously priced. £3.49 for Where Eagles Dare, for instance. You can actually buy and own the DVD for that.

Fortunately for me, I record off-air content onto my computer via EyeTV, and encode it for iTunes, giving me a decent library of movies and TV shows to choose from, so it’s not a total waste of money.

You can buy TV shows from iTunes on your computer, and then watch them on the device. Big whoop.

All in all, a massive disappointment. The hardware’s great, the theory’s terrific. It just needs content. We need an internet movie service – like the American Flixter – available over here. Steve needs to get iPlayer and 4OD on board, and the networks and studios have to prise their heads out of their sphincters, and offer their product at reasonable prices. It’s all very well complaining that cheaper access will damage DVD sales and repeat opportunities, but that fails to take into account the reality that their content is already available free via bit torrent sites and such like.

£4.49 or £0? Personally, I’d like to see a legitimate price point somewhere between the two.

In the meantime, the elegant and simple Apple TV box sits under my television, waiting patiently for the Future.

At least it’s not taking up a lot of room.

All rants are ©Rob Grant, and may not be reproduced or copied without permissions, as they may contain published and pre-published work

Dying To Eat You

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:44:10 +0100

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence. I love them. And not just for the breathtaking hubris required to employ the word ‘excellence’ in the name of any organisation to which you belong, or their marvellously ironic acronym, given that their main function is the infliction of unnecessary pain on innocent people by deciding which medicines to deny sufferers of treatable ailments. I love them for the contempt they feel for the minds of the rest of us, the less ‘excellent’ members of the human race.

NICE have gone public with yet another insane claim, this one more risible than most: hamburgers are killing 40,000 people a year in the UK alone.

You read it right: forty thousand people are dying every year, thanks to ‘junk’ food.

I’ve scanned the report, and couldn’t find the name or address of a single hamburger victim, or, indeed, the name of a relative or friend who has suffered a Flaming Whopper loss. As far as I can tell, no coroner has ever entered ‘junk food’ in the cause column of a death certificate, and a Turkey Twizzler is not one of the weapons of choice in the board game ‘Cluedo’. So, just how do the NICE people arrive at this big, scary figure? Could it be that they made it up, doubled it and then doubled it again? And then hurled an extra zero on the end to make it extra scary?

Here’s the claim: over 150,000 people die each year from cardiovascular disease. NICE posits that this is imposing an ‘intolerable burden’ on health resources, and 40.000 of these deaths are preventable by the avoidance of ‘junk’ food. Now, these are big numbers. Just for fun, I trawled through the actual official Death statistics, as opposed to the imaginary ones made up by NICE. Well, it’s fun for me. Some interesting facts*:

Overall, in all age groups, there are only 2333 deaths a year caused by transport accidents of any kind: including traffic accidents, plane crashes and Prius brake failures. Does anybody anywhere seriously believe that cheeseburgers are over seventeen times more lethal than motor vehicles?

Only 2452 of cardiovascular deaths occur in the under 45 age group. Just over 1.5%.

The massive majority of these deaths (around 88% of them) occur in the over 65s age group. There are less than 18,000 deaths in total in the under 65s age group. Even if every single one of these deaths were attributable to crisps and chocolate (though even NICE would be hard pressed to band infant mortalities into this category), that’s still less than 50% of NICE’s big, scary number.

NICE appear to be suggesting that over 65s are placing an intolerable burden on the National Health Service by contracting cardiovascular disorders and, uhm, dying. Either that, or they’re burdening the system they’ve paid for their entire working lives by contracting cardiovascular disorders and not dying. Either way, I agree. The inconsiderate bastards. Contracting heart disorders in later life is clearly selfish and thoughtless, as is dying. Or living. Bastards.

Death is never fun. Well, rarely. But the fact is (and I’d better take precautions here, in case it distresses the people from NICE):

+++++++++ SPOILER ALERT +++++++++

We’re all going to die.

We’re all going to die of something at some point, no matter what the people of NICE make us eat. Are they seriously suggesting that if we all give up Turkey Twizzlers, none of us will die at all, ever? Will none of us even get ill? Moreover, speaking brutally, isn’t it living longer that actually places a bigger burden on the NHS? Aren’t there things like hip replacement surgeries and other costly afflictions of later life to take into account?

And while we’re at it: how many of these senior citizens are reckoned to have been killed by burgers? They don’t seem, in my experience, to make up the bulk of customers in the average fast food emporium, yet MacDonald’s is clearly somehow picking them off in the tens of thousands. This is a generation brought up on rationing: living on powdered eggs and sausages comprising mainly of sawdust. Five a day? They were lucky to get five a week in the fruit and veg department.

And yet they constitute the longest-living generation in recorded history.

It’s just possible, surely, that longevity may have more to do with, say, major advances in medical science than with eating celery.

And one final suggestion: perhaps NICE could change its name. It could keep the delightful acronym, but we’d all have a better idea what we were dealing with if it called itself the ‘Nannystate Institute of Cynical Exaggeration’. Or they could just abandon the acronym altogether. I have a quite few suggestions for single word titles they could more descriptively employ, if they’d care to contact me.

*The detailed causes behind the more current figures are not yet available, so for my purposes, I’m using the latest available detailed figures, which are from 2008. (This link downloads the data in spreadsheet form)
If causes of death have changed dramatically over the past year, I’d be extremely surprised, and I await correction. The 2008 figures I’ve trawled are actually slightly higher than the ones cited by NICE, which ought to work in their favour.

All rants are ©Rob Grant, and may not be reproduced or copied without permissions, as they may contain published and pre-published work

Waxing Lyrical

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 05:43:29 +0100

I love a good lyric

My favourite lyric of all time award goes to K.C. and the Sunshine Band for Give It Up. I reproduce a portion here, in the hope that, since it’s freely available on dozens of lyric sites, I’m not breeching any major copyright. Incidentally, why do all the lyric sites insist on trying to sell really bad ringtone versions of the song? Do people still pay for really bad ringtones? Isn’t that all a bit five years ago? Anyway, the lyric:

Everybody wants you,
Everybody wants your love,
I’d just like to make you mine all night.

Na, na, na, na, na ,na, na, na, na, na ,na
Baby Give it Up
Give it Up,
Baby Give it Up

It goes on in much the same vain for some considerable time, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist. Well, more than the gist: the Na, na chorus enjoys fully eight repetitions. And why not? When you’ve created poetry of such flawless wit and elegance, you want to make damned sure people hear it.

The lyric has many virtues, of course, but my favourite is that at no point in the proceedings does it ever attempt to actually rhyme. Not even a little bit. Unless you posit that the word ‘love’ could be said to rhyme with the word ‘love’, a device that K.C. Contrives to use in ten consecutive lines at the end of his monster oeuvre.

It is, in short, a classic of its kind. and if you’re the type of person who does these things, I recommend you download the poor quality ringtone immediately at astonishing cost.

Now, I’m aware that many, if not most people don’t care about the lyrics to a song. Most people, in fact, barely notice the lyrics at all, which I find baffling: it’s like enjoying food because of the way it looks but not the way it tastes. Lyrics are at least half the song, surely. Otherwise it’s just music with someone grunting a tune over it. True, there actually are some songs like that. And they’re not all by Cheryl Cole.

This invective was inspired by a glimpse (accidental) of a performance of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ on the show Glee. There’s an undeniable energy to the song: a kind of building, rumbling excitement that ultimately doesn’t quite deliver. It’s all build up. The chorus never really happens. The section of the song designated as the chorus is really more of a middle eight: it’s certainly not climactic. If anything, it’s even more low key than the verses that lead up to it. Watch people perform it in karaoke: there’s always a sense of vague disappointment at the end of the song as it sort of peters out, wittering on about streetlight people. But that’s not wherein my biggest difficulty lies.

My biggest difficulty lies in trying to work out what the song’s actually about.

Again, I reproduce a small portion on the grounds that it’s freely available from multiple dodgy ringtone-selling sites:

Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world,
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.
Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit,
He took the midnight train goin’ anywhere …

All fine and good. Very reminiscent of Bon Jovi’s classic Livin’ On A Prayer, even sharing with it a healthy distain for the letter ‘g’ on the end of a participle. So far, so good (I’m not going to quibble about the merits of trying to rhyme the words ‘girl’ and ‘world’ and ‘boy’ and ‘Detroit’ – there are bigger fish to fry, here). We’re building up a picture of a couple of disenchanted young people who leave their mundane lives in search of adventure. What will become of them? Will they find what they’re looking for? Will they, cross fingers, meet and find it together? Or, my least favourite option: will the lyricist completely abandon the hapless pair and neglect to so much as even mention them again in the entire song?

You guessed it.

Why? Why are the lyricists wasting my time making me care about these people if they’re just going to leave me dangling? And what exactly is it that these kids mustn’t stop believin’ in? God? The American Dream? The Amtrak train timetable? The inherent kindness of strangers at late night railway stations?

As far as I can make out, the song is urging young people to run away from home in the middle of the night without a word to loved ones, with no particular destination in mind or any kind of coherent plan for the future.

Is it really any wonder we never hear from them again?

And me? I’m afraid I’ve already stopped believin’. I prefer listenin’ to songs with better writin’.

All rants are ©Rob Grant, and may not be reproduced or copied without permissions, as they may contain published and pre-published work

Checkmate, Mr. Bond

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:46:52 +0100

Whenever you see a game of poker in a drama, you can bet your bottom dollar you’ll hear the following dialogue:

‘I’ll call your ten thousand … and raise you fifty thousand more’.

If you tried this manoeuvre on a riverboat, the next two sounds anyone would hear would be the report of a gun and the thud of your body slumping lifeless to the floor. Saying you’re going to call, and then tacking on a raise is illegal. Calling and raising are two utterly different responses to a bet. Once you’ve announced you’ll call, you’ve stated you’re going to put in an amount equal to the bet that’s been made, and that’s an end to it. If you want to raise or re-raise the bet that’s been made, you say ‘raise’. There is a good, albeit dull, logical reason for this: if you announce what you’re going to do, you get to see your opponent’s reaction, so if you could make an announcement, then change your bet, it would give you an unfair advantage.

You will also likely see the following situation unfold in a fictional poker game: an opponent will make a bet that’s too big for our hero to cover. Our hero, who is holding a monster hand, will then beg, steal or borrow money to cover the bet, only to find he’s facing an even bigger, more monstrous hand, and he’ll wind up in debt to an amount he can’t possibly pay back.

Again, this is nonsense. Not only are you not allowed to buy more chips once a hand is in play, attempting to do so will once again result in your finding a smoking, circular hole in your forehead. If you can’t cover a bet completely, you simply shove in what you have left, and your opponent takes back the balance of his bet. This is the only way poker could be played, otherwise the person with the most money on the table would win every hand simply by placing bets no-one else could cover.

Which begs the question: why are poker scenes only ever written by people who can’t play poker?

Even the climax of the legendary poker movie The Cincinnati Kid contains some extremely dubious play. The players consistently make ‘string bets’ (call and raise) Edward G. Robinson’s character, Lancey ‘The Man’ Howard, a professional gambler, stays in the final hand at ludicrous expense, holding out for the one preposterously unlikely card in the deck that would give him a straight flush, at odds that simply don’t make sense. He couldn’t just make a living playing that way.

Bond’s winning hand in the Daniel Craig Casino Royale typifies cinema’s attitude to poker: a good hand is beaten by a better hand, which is beaten by a better hand, and so on, all the way to Bond’s own straight flush. It’s not tremendously skillful of Mr. Bond to win with a straight flush. My granny could do it. In fact, my great, great granny could do it from the grave. Given the cards on view, no other hand could possibly beat it. What a genius he isn’t. If that particular unlikely combination of hands did come up in a genuine game, the players would be whining for decades about what bad beats they’d suffered. Winning with straight flushes is not what makes poker interesting. What makes poker interesting is when you win a big hand with a pair of twos, or, better still, with absolutely nothing at all. That’s where the skill lies, and that’s where the drama is. And that’s what screenplay writers don’t seem to understand. That’s not the only thing the Casino Royale screenwriters failed to understand, of course. They had a very flimsy grasp of plotting in general. The villain’s plan to fund his evil scheme revolved around his having to win a multi-million dollar poker game without cheating. Not the world’s best fiendish plan ever. Especially if you come up against Commander James ‘Straight Flush’ Bond. Still, that’s for another rant.

And, by the same law of crappiness, movie chess games must also end with the seemingly indomitable grandmaster making an apparently devastating move, only to have his opponent ignore the threat completely, make an unsuspected move with a minor piece and announce ‘Check and mate’, to the grandmaster’s angry astonishment. Again, this simply wouldn’t happen. Very few games beyond amateur level end in an actual checkmate, and absolutely no grandmaster ever failed to spot an impending mate one single move away. A grandmaster will resign when mate is twenty-one moves away. Or thirty-one. He doesn’t hang around and hope the other guy hasn’t seen it. He’s a grandmaster, for crying out loud. He’s played the game before.

So, a note to scriptwriters everywhere: only write poker and chess scenes if you actually know how to play the games. If you really don’t know how to play poker, please play me.

And, for pity’s sake, please give your super villains evil plans that might actually work.

All rants are ©Rob Grant, and may not be reproduced or copied without permissions, as they may contain published and pre-published work

iPadding

Fri, 4 Jun 2010 12:15:08 +0100

I’ve had my sticky hands on an iPad for a week, now. Here are my thoughts on it.

For the record, it’s the top end model, with 3G and 64 Gigabullets of memory. Of course it is. I couldn’t reasonably be expected to lug around a second rate pad, now, could I? People would point at me in the street. I might come across someone with a better model, and how, then, could I avoid having to eviscerate myself with a Samurai sword?

I’d heard chilling tales of disastrous Wifi connectivity following the launch in the U.S., but, mercifully, such problems have not manifest for me. It maintains a good signal all over the place: far better than my iPhone. And it is a good signal: I can watch a show from the BBC’s iPlayer from the moment I click on ‘play’. The picture’s good, too. It’s better than watching on a computer screen.

It arrived with about 80% charge, and started up right away. You have to hook it up to your computer to get it operational, and here’s a surprise: unlike the iPhone and the iPod, it doesn’t charge via the computer’s USB port. You have to plug it in to the mains (plug supplied) to charge it.

As befits good battery practice, I let the battery discharge completely before I charged it up again: you have to train a battery brutally if you want to get the most out of it. It actually took a couple of days of fairly high usage to reach its nadir, which was quite impressive, and it took almost four hours to get from zero to full.

The screen gets very dirty, very quickly, no matter how scrupulously you wash your hands. The Apple store rep said that was because my fingers exuded ‘natural oils’, which made me worry that, in the future, I may become a source of cheap, renewable energy, and people will start fighting wars over me. Apple have given up endorsing screen protectors for all their devices, because they attract so many complaints: they don’t stick properly or for long enough, or they’re impossible to fit without getting air bubbles all over the place, but I’d say it’s an essential purchase for the iPad. If only I knew which of the dozens on offer were any good.*

For lugging around, you’ll also want a cover. The Apple own-brand cover sold out almost immediately, even though it looks fairly nasty, and Apple are now claiming there’ll be a three week delay if you order this instant. There are countless alternatives available; there’s even a Louis Vuitton version at a rather tasty £240. I won’t be splashing out on that, though. I won’t have to commit hara-kiri if I bump into another user sporting one, though I do hope I’ll have the Samurai sword close by.

It’s been said that the iPad’s a solution without a problem. That’s true enough. It was also true of the laser. So what, essentially, is it for?

Well, I imagine it’ll be a boon on long journeys, particularly flights. Videos look great, and you could expect to watch non-stop for the duration of a trans-Atlantic flight without needing a recharge. You can take an entire library of books, which you can download via the free Apps iBooks and Kindle. There’s a host of free books, mainly classics, available, and most best sellers, if you’re willing to pay. I get a bad reaction from a great many people when I advocate electronic books, as if I’m demanding that all real books should be burnt immediately, everyone be forced to stare at a retina-burning screen for all eternity. I’m not. There’s room for both options. The advantages of e-books include the ability to change the size of the text, perform text searches, add bookmarks and notes. You can even select text passages and bookmark them. The downside is, they’re not so good in the bath. Personally, I’m not a big fan of reading in the bath, but my wife is. It tends to make the pages swell, making novels look like giant loofahs, so we can only fit about a quarter of the books on our shelves we otherwise might. The iPad is a fantastic platform for magazines and newspapers, though the dust hasn’t yet settled on how much the publishers can get away with charging for the experience. You can, however, get the marvellous Marvel Comics App for free, and there’s a reasonable selection of free comics, too.

And then there’s the games.

I’m not very big on video games these days. I used to be. When my son was born, the first thing that came into my head at that Kunta Kinte moment was “At last: someone to play computer games with me!” The problem turned out to be that there was a very small window between his being able to hold the controller, and his being able to thrash me into humiliation at whatever game we tried. So my interest waned. Still, I dabble occasionally, if alone. Some games are better on the iPad, some better on the iPhone. Pinball HD is amazing on the pad, for instance. The device might have been built for it. Word games, like Muddled, for instance, seem to suit the smaller screen.

Music? Well, it works fine, but you just feel like you’re handling an iPod from Land of the Giants. It can hook up to Bluetooth headphones, which is a definite bonus, but a decent set is fairly expensive.

Photos look great, and you can even use the iPad as a stupidly expensive electronic picture frame. It’s better than looking at photos on your computer, because you can flick through them, pinch zoom and so on. Neat.

Google Maps’ Street View works superbly on the iPad: you can drag the view round with your finger and get the full interactive experience. Browsing in general is good, with the caveat that Apple steadfastly refuses to activate Adobe’s Flash on mobile devices, rendering some sites unviewable. There’s an awful lot of Flash on the Web … On the upside, YouPorn is updating all its videos to work on the iPad. I’m told. By a pervert.

You can use the iPad as a Word Processor. Apple have released Pages for the device, currently priced at £5.99, and it’s a fine implementation. The on-screen keyboard is almost full size in landscape orientation, but the virtual keyboard doesn’t give you any tactile feedback, and if you’re a touch typist, it’s very easy to lose your place. In addition, there’s very little screen real estate left over for the actual text. You can make emergency adjustments to a document, but I wouldn’t plan on writing your novel with it. I bought the keyboard dock, which turns the iPad into a mini-computer. It’s possible to do some serious work with this set up, though I find it hard to get used to having no mouse. The keyboard dock works fine, and it can be plugged into the mains so you can charge as you type, but it’s quite heavy and unwieldy for travel. You’d probably be better off buying the Apple wireless Bluetooth keyboard, though it is an entire English pound dearer.

As a presentation device, the iPad shines. You can display videos, PowerPoint (or, rather, Keynote) presentations, spreadsheets, documents and music. You can, with suitable leads, plug the device into TVs and sound systems, or just hand it over to interested parties. The speaker’s OK, not brilliant: seems better than the MacBook speaker to my untutored ear, but I wouldn’t plan on using it as a hand held disco.

Hilariously, you can actually use the iPad as a phone, if you have a Skype account. You’ll need the (free) Skype for iPhone App. There isn’t an official iPad version. I plan to use it on my next Starbucks visit.

For work (why did I leave work till last, Sigmund?) it seems instantly indispensable. I can edit scripts and novels, consult storyboards, view rushes, receive and send emails and even, uhm, rant on the road. The 3G connection (I went for O2) is commendably fast, though I do suffer from download limit fear, and I wouldn’t dream of turning on roaming when I’m abroad.

So, all in all, am I glad I got my iPad?

Don’t be stupid.

*Addendum:
Finally settled on a screen protector: the ZAGG Invisible Shield. It’s a bit on the expensive side. Oh, all right: it’s insanely expensive. And I don’t really need the back protector, but it does the job. It can be applied and removed countless times (it comes with a lifetime guarantee), and eventually I worked out how to apply it bubble-free. There’s a spray supplied, and the trick is to wet the sheet on both sides before applying. It seems anti-intuitive, but that’s how it works. You then smooth it down with the supplied, uhm, smoother thing. It took a few attempts, but once it’s in place, it does stick. And no more fingerprints.

All rants are ©Rob Grant, and may not be reproduced or copied without permissions, as they may contain published and pre-published work

Phone Manners

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:00:54 +0000

A woman in front of you in the supermarket checkout queue is on her mobile phone. From the tone of her conversation it’s clear that none of her immediate family are in mortal peril, nor is the success or failure of a multi-billion dollar hostile takeover bid on the line. She is, in short, talking drivel. Boring drivel. In fact, even she seems bored by the mind-numbing mundanity of the pointless drivel she and her remote conversationalist are spewing as she clumsily attempts to transfer her shopping from the trolley to the conveyor belt with her one free hand. At any time, she could terminate the call politely on the grounds that she’s momentarily busy, and resume the conversation in just a few short minutes, once she’s through the checkout. No-one would die. Governments would not fail. Humankind would not miss out on an astonishing new discovery that’s just waiting to be teased from her enormous brain. But, no, she persists. She ignores the till attendant, of course. Why not? They are, after all, scum. She crooks the phone between her cheek and her shoulder as she packs her bags with the shopping, then fiddles around in her handbag for her purse because it appears to come as a freaky surprise to this intellectual giant that she’s actually going to have to pay for the shopping at the conclusion of the transaction. The till attendant asks her if she has a loyalty card, and she nods in a curious way, because a phone is wedged between her cheek and her shoulder, and rummages in her purse. She nods because, as we’ve established, the till attendant is sub-human scum, unworthy of verbal acknowledgement, and because she’s afraid that if she speaks as a human being might, the flow of pointless inanity might be interrupted, at which point, presumably, the Universe would end.

Now, leaving aside the fact that it’s really a bad idea to engage in any kind of financial transaction whilst distracted in any way, how rude is this woman? Would it be overly impolite to bring attention to her social ineptitude by placing a plastic bag over her head and vacuum sealing it? Would any court in the land judge the till attendant harshly for beating her insensible with an over ripe, bendy cucumber?

The problem is that mobile phones have entered our lives so swiftly and with such proliferation that etiquette hasn’t had time to catch up. We need an agreed code of practice to address the problem. I believe I’m just the man for the job.

It ought to be straightforward: at the heart of it, manners is simply about considering other people. On that basis, here are some rough guidelines.

Talking too loudly on a mobile phone is clearly inconsiderate. Especially in confined spaces. Even more especially in confined spaces from which it’s impossible to escape. Like a bus. More especially yet if one of the passengers on the bus is me. Yet more especially still if the conversation is being conducted in some obnoxiously guttural foreign tongue. If you absolutely must speak Polish loudly on a bus, at least have the good grace to do it on a bus in Poland.

It’s obviously impolite to conduct a phone conversation in a cinema during the climax of the movie, though not obviously enough to discourage those at the dreggier end of the gene pool. If you don’t want to watch a film; if you’d rather talk to your friends either in the flesh or over the ether, or if you just feel like running up and down some aisles, giggling, go somewhere else and do it.

Again, obviously, it’s wrong to make a phone call while you’re driving. It really ought to be obvious, because there’s a law against it. Though curiously, there being a law against it has seemingly made it less obvious to many people. Since the ban, in December 2003, the incidence of drivers using mobile phones whilst in transit has almost tripled. Bizarre. It’s as if in being declared illegal, the practice has become more appealing. In 2005 alone, it was responsible for at least 14 deaths and over 400 injuries. Given that a Bluetooth headset can be had from any Halfords store for around a tenner, these tragic figures are fairly astonishing.

In general, if you have absolutely nothing of any moment to say, surely there are better ways of achieving your end than making a phone call. You could, and this is, admittedly, a bit left field, try ‘not talking’. That’s right. Try not saying anything at all. There’s no shame in it. You might even try thinking, which could, in some cases, eventually lead to your finding something of moment to say. For the most part, if you’re out and about, and nothing happens, and nothing at all occurs to you that’s in any way worth communicating, fight the urge to reach for your Nokia.

And, for the record, ‘I’m on the bus. Yeah. The W7. Yeah.’ does not qualify as something worth communicating.

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