Cutting out cyber chatter

Well, good luck with that, Kate. Meanwhile, out here in the sticks we don’t have those sort of problems. We still have no mobile phone reception. Not unless you count leaning out of the upstairs windows waving the phone in the air.

And it was only last year that we finally got superfast broadband. Our neighbours just down the road are still waiting.

So we never had these agonies of too much screen time or inappropriate communications. At home, at least, all phone calls were on landlines and the only possible internet connection was on the computer in the study – and that for years was pitifully slow. And there were four of us fighting over it.

So the boys never got into the habit of consulting their phones every second because there was no point. Early habits are deeply embedded. Even though their phones are their lifelines elsewhere, they’re not totally addicted and at home, they’re still inclined to sling them in the fruit bowl and forget them.

Kate Winslet rails against a sight we’ve all seen – families out for the day, each engrossed on their own screen, not talking to each other. She and her husband make a conscious decision to switch off phones at home and play games with their children, get them outdoors as much as possible, talk to them.

Many of us, of course don’t have to make that effort. Rubbish broadband connection might be annoying, isolating, expensive and inconvenient, but at least you can always console yourself that it probably does wonders for family life.

Monopoly, anyone?

SO Tom Bradby, pictured above, is prettier than Huw Edwards –which possibly explains why the ratings for ITV’s News at Ten have soared by a third since Tom took over.

Meanwhile, even though the BBC’s Ten o Clock news still has twice as many viewers as ITV – four million against two million – they’re trying to get ahead of the game. They’re planning a new studio.

A new studio? It will cost a fortune and we won’t even notice. Don’t they realise that we don’t even care about their glitzy studios? Especially when we’re paying for it… All you need is a newsreader and a desk. Anything else is just gimmicks.

Buy Huw Edwards a new suit and tie and that should do the trick.

Even better, of course, is to listen to the news on BBC Radio 4 –it tells you much more and the newsreader could be stark naked for all you know.

I once had a letter of apology from the taxman. It was a long time ago, of course. The taxman had decided that what I’d said I’d earned in a year I’d actually earned in a month. If only….

In a state of high panic, I took a carrier bag of threatening letters and papers into the tax office, Regent House in Darlington, where a comfortable, competent lady in a cardigan looked at it all very carefully and said of course I didn’t owe so much tax. Don’t worry. She’d sort it out. And she did.

Fast forward to 2015. Regent House – like other local tax offices – is now long gone and transformed into flats. The competent ladies have been put out to grass and replaced by call centres – where you can call and call but don’t get answered.

Half of all calls to HMRC were unanswered last year. That’s 12 million people left hanging on. 12 million! Just think of those wasted hours and soaring blood pressure. If nothing else, it must cost the NHS a fortune.

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee this week described the service as “abysmal.” I think they were being polite. The system is in meltdown and I could give you any number of horror stories just from my family.

Best, or worst, is my 87-year-old brother-in-law – income virtually unchanged for the past 20 years – who suddenly got a demand for £10,000. A former bomb-disposer, he refused to be bullied.

“I’ll pay up if you can tell me who’s given me £50,000 and where it is,” he said and is still waiting for a reply.

You’ll probably have your own horror stories. Most of us do. The independent adjudicator received more than 11,000 complaints about HMRC last year and nearly all of them were settled in the consumer’s favour.

HMRC is quite simply not fit for purpose.

A spokesman has apologised, yet again and said “There is lots more we need to do.”

Well yes. They could start by bringing back local tax offices – and all those competent ladies in cardigans.

WHEN a thief nicked tennis star Serena Williams’ phone from a restaurant chair, she jumped up, ran after him, caught him and got him to hand it back again. Then went on Twitter to tell everyone about it..

"Superhero? Maybe? Oh HELL YEA!!” she wrote. “ I've got the speed the jumps, the power, the body, the seduction, the sex appeal, the strength, the leadership and yet the calm to weather the storm.”

Well yes. But not perhaps the modesty…