('A London Life' column from yesterday's paper)

Some time on the night of the 4th September, between curtain up at All About My Mother at the Old Vic and waking up the next morning, I mislaid my mobile phone. Perhaps it fell out of my satchel; perhaps Kevin Spacey pickpocketed me in the crush of the bar; perhaps the stupid thing slipped down the side of the sofa when I slumped home.

Frankly I didn't much care. Blessing in disguise, I thought, relieved to be shot of the demanding little object. Nothing sets me more on edge than receiving a call when one is not wanted: makes me feel furtive and guilty even when I have no cause to be. I have a pathological dread of listening to my voicemail - and a still deeper fear of the vendors at the Carphone Warehouse, who try to push ever flashier models, each one more useless than the last.

Going through life without being interrupted was, initially, delightful. Peace at last. I was forced to such quaint expediencies as using my landline, making proper arrangements and sticking to them, or wandering into the pub on the suspicion that my friends were there (they usually were). Only the discovery that the standard price for a payphone is now 40p(!) tempered my bliss.

I have not died in the intervening four weeks. But the charm of not being bothered is wearing thin, tempered by the discrimination I have been subjected to. With all the attention on MyFace and Spacebook, it's easy to overlook how utterly indispensible the mobile phone has become in modern communication; no one seems able to grasp the fact of not having one. "So whereabouts are you?" I am asked, each time someone calls my home phone.

Finally this weekend, I snapped: having failed to find my friends at an agreed venue I was forced to wander about, vaguely looking for them for 20 minutes before wandering home. A call would have located them in a flash. My girlfriend, meanwhile, is issuing ultimatums, viewing my mobile-free protest as a personal affront. Reluctantly, I shall cave in. I shall go to the police station, decide that I really have been robbed, claim a new model on the insurance and go back to my £40 a month habit.

It's sad. Being a mobile-free Luddite ought to be an honourable protest - after all, the original Luddites went around smashing the first machines of the industrial revolution as they knew that short of making their working lives easier, they would merely render the worker easier to exploit. But when every single person about you has willingly signed up for exploitation - and doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of not being exploited - what can you do but join them? Mine's a Nokia - with a large silent button.