Does your mobile phone make you feel popular? If you don't get a call or a text in an hour, a day, two days, how do you feel? Anxious? Do you get a little oo! of excitement when you glance at your phone to see '3 new messages received'?

I sat behind a woman on the train home from Leeds yesterday. I could see her reflected in the window, scrolling, scrolling through the names in her phone. She called, I think, 15 people in the two and a half hour journey. Curiously, I thought, she didn't receive any calls.

All her questions were the same, aggressively asked, tenacious and direct: 'What are you doing?', 'Where are you?', 'What football match are you watching?', 'Why haven't you called me?', 'When can we meet up?', 'What about Tuesday?', 'Why not Saturday lunch?'.

Why can't you, what's the matter, when will you, when can we.

I wondered who all these people were, if they were friends or people who validated her sense of self-worth.