I’VE arranged to meet someone I know outside the Ashmolean and they want to know my mobile phone number. “You won’t need it” I say, “you already know what I look like and I’ll be standing by the door.”

But in 2015, this is not enough.

“What if I’m late?” they panic. I tell them that if they’re late I will do something unprecedented. I won’t phone them. I’ll just wait.

It will be much the same as when I wait for a bus. I spend a long time waiting for buses to turn up in Oxford. But not once have I felt the urge to phone up the driver and ask if he’s stuck in traffic. All it requires is a little patience.

Besides which, the mobile phone which I begrudgingly possess won’t be switched on. I only keep it in case of serious emergencies. Were it switched on I’d go to any lengths to avoid actually using it.

The model I have uses the newfangled touch screen technology which leaves me incessantly tapping on a screen, like an infuriated woodpecker, while nothing happens.

The phone will frequently make little woodpecker sounds back at me – the aural equivalent of sticking two fingers up at my efforts.

Often I can’t work out how to answer or make a phone call. What my phone can do well is to tell me what the weather is like in Nigeria.

On the rare occasions I’ve tried to send a text message the phone predicts what I want to say with the accuracy of a brandy-addled Mystic Meg predicting the outcome of the Booker Prize.

So should I tell the person I’m due to meet about the frightening science fiction world I read about - where there are no mobile phones?

Victims would leave for work in the morning for work and come back at night without anyone examining their exact whereabouts.

Your bank, if they felt obliged to contact you, would write you a letter. If you really had to make a call you could go to a phone box.

People were forced to survive like this for decades, I’ll explain. “And not once did anyone miss their bus owing to a last minute request to pick up 10 fags and a bottle of Chardonnay.”

They’ll look at me astonished. How could people possibly survive? And yet we did – quite happily.

Now we have absurd national days dedicated to everything from snorkelling to asparagus how about a National No Mobile Phone day? We could meet up like this again, I’ll tell them. “It’s genius really. You don’t need a mobile phone. All you have to do is arrange a place and a time, and then turn up.”

“Sounds great,” they‘ll say. “Text me the details and I’ll book it online.”