GAME OF GIVE AND TECH

One of the biggest battlegrounds in our house is in an area of less than six square inches.

That’s the size of my teenage son’s phone screen, and prising him away from it to eat or converse with the rest of us is never straightforward.

I explain that I limit how much time he has on it for his own health. Sundays are screen-free and the phone goes off at 7pm.

I have no idea if I’m doing the right thing. Yet the parents who live in Silicon Valley, the very cradle of this technology, restrict their kids’ access to devices – and that should tell us something. As far back as 2007, Microsoft founder Bill Gates brought the hi-tech shutters down on his own daughter’s screen time when she grew obsessed with the then equivalent of Fortnite.

Just a couple of years ago my younger son got a drone for Christmas. I couldn’t see any issue with him being out in the fresh air taking aerial pictures with it – yet passengers at Gatwick had an all-too-real taste of the potential harm a drone could do.

There was a time when I welcomed the advantages that new technology, from satnavs to Bluetooth, gave us. But now my default position is to be suspicious.

Our adored cocker spaniel Gracie was attacked by a fox in our back garden last week.

Despite a howl we never want to hear again, she escaped with a cut on her face and some tendon damage to her back legs. Shaken and upset, we took her to the emergency vets.

The woman behind the counter suggested the reason for the attack was because “we’ve taken their land”.

It shows that even with their diseases, bin-foraging and incursions into our homes, foxes still inspire huge support from our animal-loving public.