I kept a count of the emails I received last week, and there was 1,426. Now, don’t be fooled into thinking this was because I’m particularly popular, this is pretty much usual for most of my friends.

On top of that, I probably spoke to a good couple of hundred people either on the phone, text, or via social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Then, while I was there, I probably skimmed across another thousand or so updates and messages. Then if you add to that the amount of news I read via the five news and information ‘apps’ I have on my iPhone, and throw in the other 3,000 advertising messages the average person is supposedly exposed to each day… no wonder I feel like I need a holiday!

It does make me wonder, though, how much is too much information and where will it stop?

On Saturday a friend and I went for a drive into the Cotswolds. It’s one of my favourite places on the planet.

Gorgeous scenery, picture postcard villages, rolling hills, crumbling ruins, everything a particularly amateur photographer adores.

As well as that, it’s also got another great selling point – very little mobile phone coverage in a lot of places.

I was without mobile phone coverage for about three hours, and embarrassing as it is to admit, it made me extremely edgy. What with not only having to rely on my own brain for conversation and information, we also had to do crazy things like read street signs rather than rely on a little dot moving across a map on my phone to get where we were going.

Needless to say we didn’t get lost, and had a great time.

But to go back to the question of where will it stop: there used to be three places in the world where I knew I would be completely un-contactable.

The first was in a pool, but now I see they’ve developed a phone that works under water. By the way how does that conversation go exactly? “I’m in the (bubble.. bubble) pool”. “What?” “I’m in the (bubble bubble bubble) POOL”!

The second was on a long haul flight to Australia, although nowadays you can make a call and also use the internet on some planes.

And the final place? A desert. A couple of years ago I took my mum on a road trip from Las Vegas to The Grand Canyon and Monument Valley.

We spent a whole week with no mobile phone signal. Can you imagine it? It nearly killed my friend and I, but it struck me that my mum, however, couldn’t have given a damn. She spent her time reading maps, books, looking at scenery and concentrating on trying to master the digital camera we’d just bought her.

So while we, the youngsters, wasted hours waving our phones in the air like we were directing an aeroplane to a parking spot, she was completely at peace.

On that trip we also met a Navajo guide who takes tourists horse riding. He didn’t own a mobile phone and had never used a computer. We thought he was living a pretty dull life. When we asked him if he ever wanted to do anything else or go anywhere, he laughed and said ‘I live in the most beautiful place in the world, work with animals I love, and live surrounded by my family and friends, why would I?

It’s good to know there’s still some lessons that you don’t need a ‘smart’ phone to learn.