Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.

Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

What one discovers in life, I find, is that one's personality defects don't come and go.

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people's intimate conversations. Increasingly, we are all in our virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading or just staring dangerously at other people.

What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.