Etiquette can't manage our mobile addiction So far so good, although I have noticed that using the vibrate mode makes it very hard to find your phone again once you have mislaid it: many are the frantic mornings when I have commanded absolute silence in order to track an almost imperceptible low buzz all around the house, like a sniffer dog padding after a dying bee, until finally the hunt ends deep beneath a sofa cushion or high on a bathroom shelf. And then Debrett's went on with the stern and indisputably true line, "People with you deserve more attention than those at the end of a phone," and my responses began to change from "never" to "occasionally" guilty. For I have, on rare moments, sneaked a look at Twitter (which once I spurned) when in company, by holding the phone strategically angled inside my handbag. It was not that the company was dull, just that breaking news is so interesting, and it will insist on changing so often. If you are keen on news, as I am, then a mobile telephone is the equivalent of having a small, portable McDonald's in your pocket for those with a boundless appetite for fast food. You can feel the tug of the addiction, and it's a battle to keep it in check, but you know you must try, otherwise you'll be reading the news at 2am, hollow-eyed, bingeing on information like some 18-stoner still rocking up to the drive-in at night, hollering for yet another Big Mac and supersize fries. How did it come to this, so quickly? Technology came along without warning and consumed us, just as opium devoured the Chinese in the 19th century, and gin flooded the hapless boozers of Hogarth's London. It recognised the human thirst for information and communication, and both inflamed and saturated it. Back in 2008, only five years ago, the news that Madonna slept with her BlackBerry under her pillow was enough to make a newspaper headline. It seemed confirmation of Madonna's relentlessly driven nuttiness: we all rolled our eyes and turned back to our books at bedtime. But now, vast numbers of us keep our mobile telephones by the bed, albeit not under the pillow, where you run the risk of speed-dialling someone in your sleep. I sincerely hope that some readers form the honourable exception. I regret to say that I do not. The BlackBerry acts as a small torch, a clock, and it wakes me up with a convenient news digest even before I have brushed my teeth. Yet sometimes, if I have forgotten to switch it to "silent," it disturbs me with its little squeep in the night, that tinny electronic brag of: "I know something you don't know," and I start to hate it. Clearly, this can't go on. We have to learn how to manage the firewater, to dilute it and confine it to appropriate occasions, otherwise we'll all go gaga. Addiction is making us rude and poorly rested, irritable and short of attention span. New codes must evolve: there should be handsomely carved, wall-mounted boxes in British homes, where visitors can disable and store their mobile phones. I am going to take a small stand myself. I am going to turn the thing off at 10pm, put a battery in my wristwatch, and stock up on stamps and notecards. Really, Debrett's, I am. Mind the way you twerk, ladies I went away for a week, and arrived back to discover that Britain had found a new word, "twerk" - meaning a super-speedy, highly suggestive bottom-jiggle - which was being flung all over the place with reckless abandon. It had been rendered newsworthy by the crude performance of Miley Cyrus, the former Disney child star, at some music awards. Things had clearly degenerated badly in my absence; I shall have to think twice before leaving the country again. Then it struck me that this was nothing new. I first witnessed it in a Barbados nightclub, about 17 years ago. It was quite an eye-opener, and it seemed that everyone in the club could do it effortlessly, except me. I had to admire its athleticism, but I didn't attempt it; there is no more unhappy sight, I suspect, than a slow, failed twerk, like watching an aspiring high-jumper get hit in the face by a bar. Indeed, I'm not sure that the twerk-related moral panic is in order, since few of our young people will be physically fit enough to be able to do it with any real conviction. Beyoncé did it, of course, a decade ago in her Crazy in Love video, back when it was known as booty-shaking. She has a particularly regal style of twerking that involves a clear, steady gaze with a hint of hauteur, as though her bottom is doing something quite independently of her consciousness. Miss Cyrus, I'm afraid, got it all wrong by wearing a suggestive giant foam finger and making silly lascivious faces, the equivalent of wearing a miniskirt and a low-cut top at the same time. If you really must twerk, do it like a lady. Vlad, take a tip from François I felt a frisson of sympathy for the French prime minister François Hollande, widely pilloried in France and beyond for a picture, right, in which he is pulling a gormless expression in front of a blackboard emblazoned with the words "Today, it's back to school." When we look in the mirror, we automatically compose our features into a broadly acceptable "mirror face," and delude ourselves that we appear thus to others. But which of us has not been horrified by a surprise snap, taken when our facial expressions have secretly run riot without our knowledge? I have, frequently; in the days when photographs were sent off to be developed, my family had a humane dispensation that each person was permitted to destroy one particularly grotesque print of themselves. Yet Hollande can draw comfort from the rule that the more embarrassing the freely published pictures of a leader, the healthier the democracy. Hence, in Britain we can all snigger at David Cameron clumsily getting changed on the beach, just as the French chuckle at Hollande. The Russians, however, must put up with a curious parade of stage-managed images of a bare-chested, muscular Vladimir Putin hunting, horse-riding and sporting with dolphins. These are, of course, the most hilarious of all. Take heart, Mr Hollande, from the fact that there is nothing more risible than pomposity.