WELL I have committed one of the most stupid acts of my recent years. Something which has had me berating myself in the middle of the night and at the same time producing hysterical laughter from close friends and family. How can they be so cruel? After all everyone makes a mistake from time to time.

I have thrown my iPhone away. Not deliberately. But in a rare fit of housekeeping madness. Knowing it was bin day I emptied the bathroom waste paper baskets and, as I was also bringing down clothes for the washing machine, decided to put my phone, which had been charging upstairs, on top of the basket so I did not drop it.

The waste paper bin sat at the bottom of the stairs for a couple of hours. I did not need the phone so I did not retrieve it. Then I heard the rumble of the bin lorry approaching down our lane. Without any sensible thought in my head, other than cramming the last bit of rubbish into our dustbin, I rushed outside to empty the contents.

And thought no more about it until another hour or so later when I wanted to make a call. Strangely I couldn’t lay my hands quickly on my phone. I cleared the kitchen table, looked behind cushions, even the sink in the downstairs loo. Then I remembered. And screamed.

John, who was outside getting ready to take the dogs for a walk, rushed in. He genuinely thought I had done myself an awful injury. I was inconsolable. I was even more inconsolable when he laughed.

He, of course, not being addicted to his phone or any phone even, does not appreciate how attached one becomes to a mobile.

When I eventually got through to the council and refuse collection, after 45 minutes of hanging on and having to use said landline, they told me there was no hope of tracing the refuse lorry and sifting through the rubbish for my phone. “It will have been crushed by the time they got to the end of the lane love,” the council lady declared with relish.

Since then I have heard of phones accidentally being baled in balers, drowned in the sea, thrown out of a car window, washed in washing machines, crunched by a Labrador and left on a plane.

It is of no comfort to learn that there are even words now to describe addiction to ones phone. Phubbing. FoMO. But best of all, and me to a T, being a Smombie.