This morning’s Observer column…

A new spectre is haunting the planet – technolust. We psychiatrists define it as the self-indulgent craving for attractive gadgets offering at best only marginal improvements over older devices but inducing fleeting, orgasmic, smug superiority in their possessors.

Technolust was thought to afflict only a small minority of the population – generally investment bankers with more money than sense and pony-tailed geeks with neither. But developments in the US have led scientists to fear that the condition is reaching epidemic proportions and affecting people regarded as immune to infection…