We wandered up to Wokingham for a few hours this afternoon to pay a visit to my girlfriends mum, who's recently discovered SMS and rather likes it; much like my own mother, who's completely uninterested in going online but appreciates the directness of barking commands or spitting sarcasm in 160 characters.

In the course of the afternoon, a text message came in from another one of her daughters, and she started tapping out a response. Whilst in the process of doing this, she was quite open that she takes ages to write messages because she insists on using proper punctuation and grammar, which was rather quaint. But then she revealed that she refuses to use predictive text because "no-one but me knows what I'm going to write".

There was a sense of pride, and also a guardedness, in the way she said it: and it was a really neatly packaged reminder that there are people who are not only indifferent, but actively hostile towards developments which they perceive as taking control away from them - even if such developments come with the best of intentions.