Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

As with email, the recipient of a texted question seems to have the option to ignore it, while nevertheless saying hello, lovely day, and so on.

I do needlepoint from kits. I give them as gifts to people in the form of cushion covers and they are often speechless with horror.

A Panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a Panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry, and, sure enough, finds an explanation. Panda. Large black and white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.

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

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

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.