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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