Emails revolutionised working life, providing an instant way to communicate without picking up the phone. “Then everyone started using them”, and they became the bane of our lives.  Last year, some 74 trillion missives were sent – the equivalent of 2.4 million a second: “many are unsolicited and pointless” but, since we are “a polite and sociable species”, they still get read. The upshot is that we are each spending, on average, the equivalent of 36 days a year on them. “Doing emails is often work avoidance or, at best, work interruption” – and time spent emptying inboxes costs money and drives down productivity.

No wonder companies are fighting back. Volkswagen closes down its email servers at 5.30pm. Atos, a French IT company, is on track to ban email and replace it with internal social networks. Now the Halton Housing Trust in Cheshire – after discovering that staff were spending 40% of their time on internal emails – has decided to make the phone its default mode of communication. “It’s good to talk”. (Editorial in The Times, London).

Sometimes one wonders how people find your email address.  I totally concur with the drift of the editorial.  Because it costs little or nothing to send emails they have become a burden, eating into our precious time.   One (otherwise excellent ) non-profit sends me two emails a day;  Bernie was doing likewise.  In the end you zap the emails un-read.  On the other hand, if we are all required to buy $500 mobile phones to communicate with the world, I shall despair. I drew a line in the sand – that is, I have an i- pad, and decided to have no  other additional i- product.  I suppose I will be regarded as a museum piece. Eventually it happens to all us beached whales.