I admit it – I’m a smartphone addict

I am often extremely dismissive of people immersed in their smartphones. I tut at the mole-ish pedestrians who step out into the traffic, faces uplit and shocked when a car goes by. Last week, in a toddler playgroup, I actually hissed at some poor father. We were in the middle of ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, with actions, when he got stuck in an iPhone trance. There he stood amid the marching midgets swiping from text messages to email to Twitter and back again. It was when he tapped on the bus times app that I snapped. Well, what a hypocrite I am. And how is it that I’ve only just noticed?

I was on my bike, in sight of Spitalfields Market, when I realised what I’d become. I tell myself that it’s important I check my mail; that it’s grand the way a smartphone lets a mother work even as she’s grilling fish fingers. But here I was, getting my phone out at each set of traffic lights, checking email and Instagram. It was dark, spitting rain and bitterly cold; hard to pull the handset from my pocket and near impossible to dry the touchscreen enough to use it. Still, whenever the lights were red, my right hand reached for it with the sort of practised fumble a drunk reaches for a ring pull. Am I a phone addict? I asked my husband when I got home. Yes, he said.

This story’s been written many times. I’ve commissioned pieces on the dangers of smartphones; I’m well aware that the men who made millions from phone tech now bring their own children up screen-free. Even so, I’ve never before paused to consider my own habit, and it’s genuinely disturbing.

We hear a lot about the terrible content of the internet and how damaging all the porn and bikini bodies are to teenage self-esteem.