Recently a disturbing new trend has emerged. The Mobile Phone. Of course for the staff of Pravda who communicate entirely by Extra-sensory perception, bringing the transmission equipment closer to the brain seems like a step in the right direction.

Weighing in at around four or five kilos, the first mobiles were a challenge for the average exec to lift to his ear

But everything else is wrong. The bleeper is too nagging. The stubby antenna is off centre. The pose is sickening. And the brain damage is permanent.

Mobile phones were created to help weigh down travelling executives and keep them from going too far away. Weighing in at around four or five kilos, and looking like a brick, the first mobiles were a challenge for the average exec to lift to his ear - and keeping the thing in position while chatting about those pointless trivialities about which executives chat was exhausting (this led to the opening of the first trendy gyms in the '80s).

But then a terrible thing happened. The mobile phone itself started to loase weight. Engineers at Motorola Communications HQ found their new range of cellphones could be propelled across a room by the force of a modest sneeze, and Nokia had to fit lead weights in theirs to stop them drifting into the air. The problem was that the things were getting too puffed up, empty-headed and full of themselves.

The solution was to give everybody a mobile - to show those trumped-up phones they weren't special after all. And it worled for a while, with the weight of the average phone stabilised at several hundred grams. But then it happened. The Strut. An innocent pedestrian's mobile would ring in the street, and whipping it out (extending nimbly in the process the special flap which cleverly concealed the microphone so that probing peasants couldn't fiddle about with it and get dribble on the mouthpiece) he would start to stride purposefully along the road, a grimace of seriousness enveloping his noble and aquiline features.

And frankly it was all too much. The bleeps - okay. The green light and illuminated buttons - alright. Even the clever phone number memory and the fact that you can smash the things into splinters are acceptable. But that swagger, yuck. It's always transparently obvious

that the call is completely pointless, one of those "I'm just calling to see whether your mobile's on too" type calls. Mobile phones - no thanks!