Electric dreams

    

© Simon Poulter 2021

There was an irony about yesterday. The day before so-called Freedom Day was spent trapped in a car for the better part of seven hours on the hottest day of the year. The plan was quite simple: drive to Kent for a pub lunch with my girlfriend’s mother, who is visiting the UK, and because of the global lurgy, had been unable to come over for the last 17 months. Yesterday she was finally free from quarantine. What we didn’t bank on was the traffic jam from hell. 

In fact, it wasn’t just a traffic jam. I don’t actually know how you’d describe it, but we were caught in it for the entire afternoon, and you couldn’t really make it up. Thanks to Twitter (which became our saviour authority, as there was absolutely zero coverage of this event on the radio or in any mainstream news outlets) we learned that piping had fallen from the underside of a bridge crossing the motorway near the Darenth Interchange, damaging three vehicles that had been driving underneath it. This led to the M25 being closed in both directions at one of its most sensitive pinch points, the Dartford Crossing. All this had happened barely minutes before we passed the M20 turnoff, seven miles further south, which we could have taken us cross-country to the pub. In the other direction, traffic queued from Dartford  back round the M25 for several miles. Nothing. Was. Moving.

It was hard not to think of an episode of One Foot In The Grave in which the Meldrews and their friend Mrs. Warboys are stuck in the mother of all jams. It is an exquisite pantomime of in-car incarceration, culminating in the exchange where, first, Victor Meldrew lets out one of his trademark “Oh, God Al-mighty!!!” exasperations, to which Mrs. Warboys offers to ease tensions with a “sucky sweet”. “Sucky sweet?!” exclaims Meldrew. “I'll be sucking on that exhaust pipe in a minute, much more of this.” 

He spoke for anyone ever stuck in a jam with little or no explanation as to what’s going on. In fact, were it not for Twitter searches of “M25” we wouldn’t have a clue what was going on and why, for four and a half half hours, we moved just two miles. On, let me say again, the hottest day of the year. It is, as my girlfriend remarked, a true test of character to be stuck in a hold-up like that, in heat like that, knowing that your day was totally wasted, without losing it. That line from Pink Floyd’s Time, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” kept running through my head. 

It took perspective. Firstly, nothing you can do about it. You’ve drawn the unlucky card today, but be thankful that whatever it was that had caused the event, what you’re going through, is probably nothing compared to the poor souls in the accident. And then, as you sit in your air-conditioned car, in relative comfort, you ponder the irony that in Germany and parts of the Netherlands and Belgium, people are without homes and businesses because of catastrophic flooding caused, the consensus seems to be, by global warming. And what caused global warming? Well, us, mainly, and our cars stuck in traffic, with the engine running, aircon on.

I don’t mention this flippantly, but yesterday’s M25 horror came just 24 hours after we’d been at a car showroom discussing a new car. The finance agreement on my current ride is coming to an end, and with the global chip shortage affecting the supply chain, a brand new car won’t just simply be available at the end of September when, ideally, I hand over the keys. My dilemma is whether to finally go green and get an electric vehicle or, at the very least, a hybrid. By 2030, it will not be possible in the UK to buy either a new petrol or diesel vehicle, with the Government adopting a Year Zero approach to getting everyone to switch to “EVs” in order to break dependency on fossil fuels. I get that. 

Science fiction has regularly depicted a future where people glide about in near-silent cars (TV’s Logan’s Run springs to mind), but this had nothing to do with saving the planet as, simply, futuristic mystique. In truth we’re almost there. Almost. Every mainstream manufacturer - not just Tesla - now offers fully electric and hybrid cars as part of their standard ranges, so you could say that things are moving in the right direction. But it’s still not enough. While EV ownership has moved beyond the early adopter stage, the UK still has a woeful lack of public charging points, rendering the usage of EVs as viable alternatives to petrol and diesel - especially for long-distance driving - to be limited.

Picture: Audi

“Why risk an electric car if you can’t charge it?”, ran a headline in The Times last month, prompting letters from readers reporting their own frustrations. “We bought a fully electric Mercedes car earlier this year,” wrote one. “It’s great to drive, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The recharging structure is woefully inadequate and unreliable. I have just spent 40 minutes driving round my local area to find a point where I can charge the vehicle overnight.” Another wrote: “Vehicle charging is so slow it adds far too much time to longer journeys. Despite all the incentives and promises, the UK simply isn’t ready. It’s a shame.” Charging infrastructure is clearly part of the issue: “We live in a northern village, dominated by tightly packed terrace housing with no front gardens or drives,” wrote another Times reader, pointing out that many houses in older towns didn’t have easy access to on-street charging points or even from running a cable from the house to a parked car. 

It’s clear that there is a desire to go electric, and eventually we all will, whether we like it or not. But there are still many obstacles to overcome. One is the premium EVs still command. Yes, over the ownership of one the lower cost of fuelling will more than compensate for the higher purchase cost, but consumers still baulk at the average £10,000 higher outlay for a brand new fully electric or hybrid model. Even worse is that a hybrid offers no tax incentive in the UK. All of that, says the government, will change. Transport minister Rachel Maclean recently predicted that the “total cost of ownership” of EVs would even out by 2025 as the cost of manufacturing fell in the way that technologies always come down in price as they are adopted in greater numbers. Grants and tax benefits, Maclean said, were still making fully electric, plug-in cars attractive, though the absence of any incentives other than fuel economy are preventing semi-sceptics like me from choosing hybrid models. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

Stuck in yesterday’s mega jam, I was struck by the number of fully electric cars we passed, and though UK sales are up this year by 145%, such vehicles still only make up 7.5% of total sales. Clearly, there is a long way to go before 2030. Cost is one thing, but endurance is another. 

Battery technology is still relatively immature, which places questions on how an EV would survive our experience like ours yesterday, not moving for the better part of four hours, with the air conditioning on full blast in 30-degree heat. I could actually see the petrol gauge lower as a result of idling with the aircon on. How the electric cars around us managed, I have no idea. MPs have expressed concerns about the prevailing lack of charging infrastructure in the UK, especially on the motorway network. Broken down EVs that have run out of juice on motorways while stuck in congestion have become a regular annoyance for the breakdown industry. 

There are also concerns that, for all the environmental benefits and carbon reductions by going electric, EV batteries contain rare metals that are difficult and dangerous to extract, and that huge amounts of energy are consumed in their processing. On top of that, they have a shorter working life than conventional fuel engines. Questions, too, surround whether the energy to recharge them comes from renewable sources.

As admirable - in principle - as the shift to electric vehicles is, there are concerns that the strategic thinking isn’t fully thought through. Research published last month by the Institute for Public Policy Research called on the government to invest £6 billion over the coming four years to incentivise other forms of transport, like bikes an e-scooters, to break our dependence on private cars overall. This comes amid concerns that the number of cars on UK roads will rise by 2% over the next 30 years, with the shift to electric cars even adding to the congestion. More land, the report added, would be needed for parking.

Something has to give. I’m no nailed-on environmentalist, but having worked from home exclusively over the last 16 months, watching the world go by out of the living room window, it’s been easy to see how much traffic has been generated by the shift to online shopping, for example. Countless white delivery vans - probably mostly diesel - along with food delivery mopeds go up and down our street in the course of a day (and I’ll admit to having contributed to all of that, especially having been largely immobile for the last three months and relying on the likes of Amazon and Deliveroo). As ever, this is a tradeoff: by not driving myself, I suppose I’m easing congestion. The shift to hybrid working, with many companies pledging to never going back to five-days-a-week office working means that there must be a change to the sort of traffic our residential streets endure, as home delivery becomes even more the norm. Hats off, then, to DPD which is gradually converting its fleet of delivery vans to fully electric vehicles from Chinese manufacturer Maxus. It is, though, only a start - the 1,500 EVs DPD is buying will only be a fifth of its total UK fleet of 8,000 vehicles.

Picture: DPD

Weighing it all up, the pros of EVs probably outweigh the cons. Yes, there is an environmental tradeoff in adopting battery-powered cars, but this is probably better than continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, as well as fossil fuel-based pollution contributing to almost one in five deaths in the UK. But we’re not there yet. As much as I would love to own Audi’s splendid new Q4 ‘e-tron’, which has earned rave reviews from the motoring press for its handling, looks, equipment and comfort, £44 grand is a lot of money for a car, Replacing my equally good Q3 with a newer version would cost at least £10k less. 

Of course, I could just not bother with either, and walk, cycle or take the bus, which would probably be, morally, the right thing to do. It just wouldn’t be all that practical on a sunny Sunday when you fancy a pub lunch. 

We’re not out of the woods yet. In fact, we’ve barely left the forest

If there’s one piece of football commentary, other than Kenneth Wolstenholme’s “They think it’s all over…” line from 1966, that I’d rather never hear again it’s the pained “Ohhhhhhh!!!!!!!!” expelled by Barry Davies as Gareth Southgate’s penalty kick was saved in that Euro ’96 semi-final. There’s something about England playing Germany that gets under everyone’s skin in this country because, on balance, it’s been a litany of disappointments following that moment of Geoff Hurst brilliance, 55 years ago. 

Since 1966 the two sides have met six times in tournaments, famously without an England victory in any knockout-stage game, and two semi-finals - the 1990 World Cup and the 1996 Euros - decided on the aforementioned dreaded penalties. Thus, in the run-up to yesterday’s Round-of-16 encounter between the team Southgate now manages and the old nemesis, we had to endure that Davies exclamation yet again, along with the pizza ad-generating penalty flops by Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle in Turin, 21 years ago. We also had to endure the Lampard ‘ghost goal’ against Germany in Bloemfontein in 2010, which played a part in a 4-1 departure from the same stage of competition as last night’s match. That defeat led to my debut as a blogger, with me, in a foul mood the next morning, bashing out 1000 angry words on the commute from Amsterdam to Eindhoven (my first blog, What Would David Bowie Do? was created and online within an hour of me sitting down at my desk).

That first post was undoubtedly a cathartic expungement of the mental toxins that had built up throughout my lifetime when it comes to England-Germany (I was born a year after the ’66 World Cup triumph - to date, the last time England won anything of note). We’ve allowed it to stick in our collective craw, fuelled by tabloid xenophobia that just loves to make reference to events in the first half of the last century. So, to meet Germany so soon in the knockout stage of Euro 2020 laid down a psychological hurdle to Southgate’s squad, a group young enough not to have been born when their head coach committed that infamous kick. The rational and non-partisan amongst you might be tempted to say that England have only beaten a team in the first round of the knockout stage of the tournament, and that greater challenges lay ahead on Saturday with Andriy Schevchenko’s tournament dark horses, Ukraine. But that doesn’t diminish the sheer relief around the stadium at the final whistle, and in pub beer gardens, fan parks, town squares and elsewhere yesterday evening, and the sense of elation that came from a rare victory over an apparent bogey. 

Picture: Twitter/England

That euphoria masked what was, actually, quite a cagey game. Southgate, as his somewhat nervous disposition does project, is not the most bullish of tacticians, and for much of the game at Wembley, England seemed to soak up German pressure. The margins between Joachim Löw's eurocrats and England were thin, thin enough that Raheem Stirling and Harry Kane were able to make use of the relatively meagre scraps thrown their way to produce a memorable victory, while Jordan Pickford pulled off a couple of brilliant saves (though one was against Timo Werner at point-blank range, which means that the shot could have gone anywhere in north-west London…).

Picture: Twitter/England

Better minds than mine have described the game as a “tactical masterstroke” on Southgate’s part, but I’m not so sure. Raheem Sterling’s 75th-minute goal came against expectation, especially given the lengthy scrutiny of his season at Manchester City, but his record at these Euros, scoring against Croatia and the Czech Republic, gave him the edge over Harry Kane in terms of goalmouth hope. When he eventually scored last night, notably after Jack Grealish had come on to liven up England’s otherwise cagey acceptance of the German press, it was a proper No.9’s goal. It gave me little pleasure to see Chelsea’s Antonio Rüdiger beaten in the build-up, but it seemed to be the goal that kicked everything else into life, with Kane - finally - doing his job ten minutes later, after a neat pass from Luke Shaw to Grealish and then onto the Spurs striker’s head. 

Did we dare, then, to believe? After the eye-straining events on Monday in the Croatia-Spain and France-Switzerland fixtures, the nervous and the cynical alike wouldn’t take anything for granted. Then again, this probably hasn’t been Germany’s best tournament, not that such an observation should have made any difference. Years of disappointment have informed us that tournament football rarely follows form. Germany weren’t poor - and Chelsea’s Kai Havertz appears to have come good for his club just at the wrong time for England - but when it counted, England had just the right combination of skill and luck, the two magic, if hard to quantify, ingredients that make for progress in these competitions.

Victory over Germany, which didn’t involve extra time or, worse, penalties, feels sweet. I hope that it has genuinely banished whatever it was that commentators felt compelled to refer to, as if England's failure in the past was down to bad luck, bad karma, or some UEFA conspiracy (the same that stops the UK from ever winning the Eurovision Song Contest). The reality, however, is that - spoiler alert! - someone has to win. In 1990 and 1996, Germany's victorIes on penalties both came after 1-1 draws in extra time, which means it is reasonable to assume that both sides were as good as each other, and it was just bad luck/boot laces/rogue blades of grass that meant that Waddle, Pearce and Southgate’s spot kicks didn’t cross the line.

England do, however, bumble along with traditions of history and fairness underpinning their game. How often is their lack of guile at fault for other sides getting beneath their skin. In modern parlance, it’s “game management”. For all the ultra-competitive Premier League blood that has run through England squads passim, we’ve grown used to disappointment by the thinnest of margins. Perhaps, then - and without loading the gun - we should have hope about what happens next? Perhaps, then, the disappointments of the past have been the result of England just not having as much belief as their Teutonic opponent, or as much guile and cunning as other opponents? Perhaps they’ve been, well, too English…?

Picture: Twitter/England

The key, now, is for England to play without fear, but also to play with the right psychology. Gareth Southgate is a bright, intelligent football man who has experienced the ignominy of a saved penalty on the game’s biggest stage. He, more than anyone at Wembley Stadium last night, would have savoured the moment and enjoyed the catharsis. He, though, will know that the job is far from done. In fact, it’s only just beginning.

“This [was] an immense performance but at a cost emotionally and physically,” he said afterwards. “We have to recover well and show that mentally we are in the right space. It is a dangerous moment for us: we will have that warmth of success and the feeling around the country that we only have to turn up to win the thing, but we know it is going to be an immense challenge from here on in.”

Age is on his players’ side, not having been to the knockout stages of a tournament before. And with all the talk of an “easy” path back to Wembley for a possible semi-final and even the final, it’s too easy for confidence to get in the way of focus. Defender Harry Maguire qualified this with his comments last night: “We have won one knockout game, and not to concede in four games is impressive, but we need to win three more games. There are a lot of good teams left in the competition and we have to play at the level we are capable of.” That test is still to come. England have entered uncharted waters in so many ways.

Picture: Twitter/England

Putin on the Ritz

It was like the 2012 Olympics, all over again. Weeks of negativity, doom and gloom, followed by 64 games of, mostly, absolute sporting joy. No terror, no hooliganism, no geopolitical shenanigans. In fact, the only notable moment of saltiness was Roy Keane and Ian Wright kicking off in the ITV studio over the latter’s unconditional warmth towards England.

There is consensus - and not just those carried along by England’s uncharacteristic wave of progress - that the 2018 World Cup in Russia has been one of the best, if not the best, in modern times. Who’d have thought it, given the suspicion of brown envelopes that stank up FIFA’s awarding of the tournament to Russia. Well done, then, Russia, or Vlad, or whoever was controlling things.

Not every match, of course has been a zinger but from the very beginning - host Russia's 5-0 demolition of Saudi Arabia - we've been treated every step of the way. By the first Friday night we had the Spain-Portugal match, one of the best internationals I've seen in years, with six goals including a tour de force by Cristiano Ronaldo which virtually sealed his record-breaking move from Real Madrid to Juventus. The following day we had Argentina being held 1-1 by Iceland, and all of a sudden all bets were off as to how the tournament would move forward. And so we went through the group stage, with two or three games daily, each as fascinating in the permutations as the next, including that memorable fixture, in which everyone and everything stopped work to watch Germany go out at the group stage for the first time since 1938.

In a World Cup lacking European footballing aristos like Italy and the Netherlands, we had the likes of Iran and Senegal punching well above their weight, and south and central America gradually slipping away as that region's traditions in international football fell somewhat short, as Argentina and Uruguay couldn't build on their respective legacies as past champions. And, yes, England: perennial underachievers, perennial failures, managed by the individual with "the impossible job" whom the nation collectively fell in love with, ending in fourth place, surviving a penalty shootout, and giving a platform to a squad of young men for whom the next tournaments - the 2020 European Championships and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar - promise so much, at last. This World Cup hasn't, of course, all been about England, but from the exclusively English perspective, this World Cup has profoundly transformed the nation's relationship with its national side. Let's hope it lasts.

Congratulations, of course, must go to France and indeed Croatia, their defeated opponents in yesterday's final. A 4-2 victory for Les Bleus, with a few controversies, a couple of monumental blunders and six goals, it provided something of a microcosm of the preceding 63 matches combined. One of the largest football nations in the world versus one of the smallest, pedigree versus underappreciated tenacity. France are, for me, surprising world champions. I'd been tipping Belgium as dark horses to win, just as many had seen Brazil or Spain as champions once more. France's ascent this time has been quite subtle. While most were focusing on the big guns - especially those who gradually disappeared - France had been getting on with progress. As he does for Chelsea, the diminutive N'Golo Kante was a giant in the French midfield, Paul Pogba demonstrated that without José Mourinho's deadening influence over him he can justify some of the hype that has followed his career, while the 19-year-old Kylian Mbappé underlined preposterously why Paris Saint-Germain made him the world's most expensive teenager indeed the second-most expensive player on the planet.

As such, yesterday's final was a fitting finale. France knows better than most how to celebrate - the scenes in Paris in 1998 are burned in the memory as the most incredible scenes of celebration I've ever witnessed. Even the sight of Emmanuel Macron going nuts, while genial host Vladimir Putin sat, atypically gimlet-eyed, at the final whistle, presented a vision of unfettered joy that perfectly characterised these last four-and-a-bit weeks of football. Whether FIFA has redeemed itself remains to be seen: the whiff of suspicion over how Russia ended up staging this World Cup will never go away, but few will disagree that it has been done in an exemplary fashion. We will have to see if Qatar in four years time will be able to do the same, even if many, if not most, have been proven wrong this time.

The Somme remains the same

© Simon Poulter 2016

I suppose it's the point, that war cemeteries are meant to be pristine, serene gardens of remembrance in contrast to the horrors of battle that created them. Those in the Valley of the Somme are no exception - their calm, perfectly arranged rows of white headstones oddly representative of the carnage unleashed 100 years ago today.

Wars so often have a turning point, either planned or unintential, when events roll back on the trajectory. For the First World War, the Somme Offensive was meant to be just such a turning point, a concerted effort by the French and the British to take on the Imperial German Army and break up their entrenched lines along a 15-mile stretch of northern France near the River Somme.

When the attack came, on July 1, 1916, it would go down in history as one of the bloodiest days in the history of warfare, costing the lives of 19,240 Britain and Commonwealth men on that first day for just the acquisition of three square miles of territory. By November 18, when the Battle of the Somme came to an end, more than a million were dead or wounded on all sides, including 420,000 British, 200,000 French and an estimated 465,000 German. The distance between the frontline on July 1 and on November 18 is just seven miles.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Standing today on the rolling fields where the battle was fought it is, of course, impossible to get a sense of the industrial slaughter that took place over the course of those 141 days, the result of terrible new artillery munitions which didn't just explode, but fragmented, reducing combatants in trenches to bloodied pulps, as well as the new machine guns which literally mowed down soldiers as they were sent over the top. But the 250 military and 150 civilian cemeteries that dot this area of Picardie combine to tell a tragic story of the staggering attrition.

© Simon Poulter 2016

The Commwealth graves, at sites like Thiepval, Albert and Contalmaison, represent the breadth of nationalities drawn into battle from different corners of the world - the 12,000 Australians killed over the course of six weeks fighting for the strategic village of Pozières, as well as the New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, Rhodesians and Indians who died for a cause that geographically and politically was not their own but one out of sworn allegiance to a distant monarch. Their graves now sit a long, long way from home.

Throughout the region there are truly humbling sites of remembrance: at Beaumont-Hamel, five miles due north of Albert, is a memorial dedicated to forces of the Dominion of Newfoundland - now part of Canada - which suffered the largest single loss of the battle's first day. 1800 members of a 2000-strong battalion of the Newfoundland a regiment, roughly one in five men from the dominion itself, killed in an unsuccessful assault lasting not much more than 30 minutes.

As you walk up and down the rows of headstones, you pass a mass of nationalities, ages and social backgrounds. There is little hierarchical order - officers lie alongside the enlisted (more junior officers below the rank of major died on the Somme than privates, and the opening day led to the deaths of almost two-thirds of British officers involved). And then you come to those which simply say 'Known Unto God', one of 100,000 graves of those whose identities are not known. At the Memorial to the Missing, at Thiepval, the names of 72,085 British Expeditionary Force soldiers provide some respect for those who were killed but do not have a known grave.

Historians will now agree that Battle of the Somme proved to be a strategic victory for the Allies, that the German trenches were broken up, and the futile intransigence that has come to characterise World War One started to come lose. The cost on that first day of July would be huge, with the largest single day's loss of life for in the British Army's history alone. 

The war itself changed warfare, with the introduction of air power and tanks, weapons of mass destruction. And it also led to a redrawing of the maps of Europe and the Middle East, the political and diplomatic impact of which would resonate through the 20th century, in the Second World War and the Cold War, even the events we are witnessing still today in Syria and Iraq. But if the Somme would be the location of the First World War's turning point, it would be another two years before the Armistice would be signed on November 11, 1918. 

The beginning of the end of the war may have begun in the Somme Valley, but it came at a heavy loss. 100 years on, only the gardens of stone give any sense of the magnitude of that loss, and the bloodshed which occurred over just 125 square miles of Northern France during those four bitter months of 1916.

Smartphone zombies - the modern urban nightmare

Because, probably, it interferes with its nation's world-renown public transport punctuality, the German city of Augsburg has come up with a clever way to stop people getting inconveniently hit by trams when crossing roads while glued to their smartphones. The city, which lies some 50 miles north-west of Munich, is trialling the use of red LEDs embedded into the ground on pedestrian crossings which flash when a tram is approaching. "It creates a whole new level of attention," an Augsburg city spokesman told the German news organisation N-TV.

According to the DEKRA Accident Research institute, 17 per cent of people on European streets use their smartphones in road traffic. One of DEKRA's researchers, Clemens Klinke, said one incident in Stockholm made a particular impression. "A young girl stood in the middle of the road, got her phone out and started texting," he told the Daily Telegraph. "It wasn’t until a bus driver sounded his horn that she realised where she was standing." Sadly, a 15-year-old in Munich wasn't so lucky last month, killed by a tram while crossing a road wearing headphones and looking at her phone.

Tragic as that was, it is sadly a symptom of the mindless attachment we have to our smartphones, and the equally mindless distraction it causes. Germans even now have a word for it - "smombies". How often do you have to step out of the way because someone is walking towards you more interested in their call or texting than looking where they're going? That might merely be an annoyance, but when people get killed by ignoring basic road safety, then being glued to a smartphone on the street is not so smart.

The smartphone has become the indispensible tool of our age. We can't go anywhere without it, we can't sit down to dinner without having one at hand, and have even started to lose our basic navigation skills because of our reliance on phone-based navigation apps. I've posted before on how anti-social phones have become, but the fact that a German city needs to install flashing lights in addition to the skill we're all taught as children of looking both ways before we cross a road, over-reliance on phones is becoming a public safety nuisance too.

The part that worries me the most, however, is how smartphones cut people off from the world, oblivious to it, others and things (trams included). For as long as I've been commuting to work, the "personal stereo" has been a blessing and a curse - a comfort to shut out the frequent horrors of overcrowded public transport, a nightmare when it involves hissy music leaking from headphones. Last week I briefly returned to commuting in London after a 17-year break, and noted how, with standing room-only on the 0711 to Waterloo, everyone to a man and woman was hunched over a smartphone, idly thumbing through e-mails or tweets or Candy Crush or whatever it was that they were doing. At least, though, they weren't getting in anyone's way.

But walk down a busy street, however, and it's impossible not to get stuck behind a zombie texter, or have your progress climbing stairs after getting off an underground train impeded by some idiot desperate to refresh their inbox as soon as a whisp of reception can be attained. Here is where the Chinese had a capital idea two years ago: the city of Chongqing became the first place in the world to create a dedicated walking lane for pedestrians hooked to their phones, with 100ft of pavement was marked with special paint and the sign "cellphone" for those wishing to dawdle along with their devices, and another "no cellphones" pathway for those wishing to go about their business freely.

In tech-mad Tokyo the problem is even more acute. The notorious melee of people traversing the pedestrian crossing at Shibuya Station has become even more hazardous due to the hundreds of people paying more attention to their phones than those around them. According to a report by the AFP news agency, incidents in Tokyo involving pedestrians or cyclists account for 41% of all phone-related accidents. Some 122 people were taken to hospital between 2009 and 2013 as a result of accidents caused by pedestrians using mobile phones.

That a teenager in Munich should have been killed by not seeing a tram coming is, sadly, no surprise. The Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo conducted research into safe use of smartphones and found that the average field of vision while staring down at one is just 5% of the normal view. Using computer simulation, NTT found that, based on an average of 1500 people on the Shibuya crosswalk at any given time, if they were all looking at their phones there would be 446 collisions, 103 falling to the floor and 21 phones being dropped.

As someone who spends most of his travelling life plugged into his iPhone listening to music and podcasts, I'm as guilty as anyone in any of these cities for shutting out the world. But I do at least reserve a little - some might say smugly so - awareness of when I'm inconveniencing others. Because nothing you read, hear or watch on your smartphone should be worth putting your life at risk. Should it?