THE TV’s turned off, the computer’s shut down, the curtains are closed and you’re curled up in bed with a cup of tea and a book.

Perfect.

But then your phone makes a noise and the whole thing’s ruined.

Of course it’s probably just another email from Amazon attempting to get you to pre-order JK Rowling’s latest effort or some deposed Nigerian prince who really wants to give you a share of his fortune, but some compulsion forces you to check just in case.

I make no bones about the fact that I am very much part of the generation overly reliant on my phone.

While I’d like to think I’m much less surgically attached to my phone than many – just ask anyone who’s ever tried to get hold of me – I am certainly guilty of an over-reliance on the little computer in my pocket.

While I’d love to be able to put it down and leave it there, it’s far too easy just to glance at it, see you’ve got an email and end up fiddling with it for ten minutes.

And of course there’s the everupdating landscape of Twitter – while a lot of it is largely pointless, there is always something new and you never know when something interesting might pop up.

And the less said about Reddit the better. I can’t help but think that if I had used the time I’ve spent looking at funny pictures and reading Q&As with astronauts on something constructive, I probably could have achieved something worthwhile.

Of course it’s a handy thing to have – being able to figure out exactly where you are in relation to where you want to be when you’re lost in a strange city is invaluable and of course the ability to get hold of anyone right away in an emergency provides great peace of mind.

But do we really need a constant flow of information? Would turning your phone off every once in a while really be a bad thing?

Certainly not, the freedom of knowing you’re not going to have any interruptions is a wonderful thing to have.

But of course out of its many functions, I also use my phone as an alarm clock, so that puts paid to that idea.