At the risk of this column sounding more than a little like last week's, I'll start by saying I was at Old Trafford on Monday.

No, I don't mean I was shopping at the Trafford Centre; I mean that after a 4am start, a trans-Pennine dash and a two-and-a-half-hour wait outside the ground, I was one of the 21,000 people lucky enough to be at the fifth day of that test match.

Thrilling; exhilarating; everything you've read or been told is true. The cricket was wonderful to watch and the outcome was uncertain to the last ball, the odds shifting like sand beneath our feet.

But being in that crowd was the thing. The Mexican waves rolling around the ground may have made some noses wrinkle in the members' section, but they made the rest of us feel like an enormous welling sea-force buoying up our boys. A solitary Aussie, bravely sporting his yellow and green jersey, seemed very small and lonely in his seat near us.

At the start of the day, I heard someone phoning in the most unconvincing sickie I have ever heard.

"Yeah, he's got a really bad throat," said the caller, as the crowd bustled to seats all around her. "Yeah, he's got to see a specialist..." About 20 of us erupted into snorts of involuntary mirth which must surely have been picked up by the poor sap left to do the work.

So far so good; so why did it get on my nerves so much that as the match progressed, all around me people were constantly on their mobile phones? They were texting their mates the score; they were taking pictures and emailing them to their colleagues; they were catching up on news on the worldwide web.

When Ponting's wicket finally fell after his courageous captain's stand, the entire ground erupted and the man in front of me dialled a mate. Laughing hysterically, he was alternately bellowing into the phone and holding it up to relay the deafening uproar to the person at the other end.

Why do people feel the need to do this all the time? Why can't we just live in the moment?

It's as if our world, hurtling ever faster into the future, has fed us such a rich technological banquet that the simple pleasure of being in the grip of natural excitement is no longer enough. We need others to confirm that our experience really is exciting, and we must prove that we really were there.

It's often been said, and it appears to be more and more the case, that the line between reality and make-believe is getting ever less distinct.

On our present diet of reality TV, is it so surprising that when presented with a genuine drama or, worse, a disaster unfolding, some people reach for their phones not to ring 999, but to record the proceedings?

For fear of living in the real world outside, children are mollycoddled off the streets and plonked before screens to play violent computer games.

Is it so surprising if they grow into the kind of thugs who kick the sense out of their unfortunate victims, record the beating, send the recording to their thuggy pals and call it happy slapping?

Yet science and technology have made us richer than kings. In the fortunate first world, we are warm, fed and dry, and largely free of the famines, pains and diseases that brought misery to our forefathers.

We switch on our flat-screen tellies and flinch as we see these ancient plagues continuing to afflict the third world.

Hopefully, the time will not come when we are so adrift from reality that we no longer respond to that sight.

Updated: 11:24 Wednesday, August 17, 2005