Forty years ago, I reported on how a Yorkshire village with no television signal was getting cable TV. Some locals had never seen television, but one 94-year-old man told me he did not want a cable going into his cottage. “If they can pump stuff into my house,” he said, “they can pump stuff out and pry on me.”

He seemed a Luddite then, but could be seen as a wise future gazer now that much of the world’s population has such a cable — and is realising it has downsides not unlike the one my nonagenarian feared.