SMARTPHONE owners — stop! Do you ever find yourself doing a U-turn and driving back home because you left your device on the kitchen table?

It’s a bit embarrassing, really, when you think about it. Usually when Amnesty International get involved, the human rights violations are in places we dismiss as far, far away. Poor, troubled, undeveloped places, or countries in the grip of some megalomaniac tyrant. Places you wouldn’t want to go on your holiday.

DOCUMENTARIES don’t tend to sell out by the lunchtime of their cinema opening night, or elicit prolonged emotional applause at the end — but the new film about Amy Winehouse was never going to be ordinary. And we all know the ending.

PERHAPS this bizarre phenomenon has also happened in your household. See if any of this sounds familiar — if it does, it would be a great comfort to me. Not as schadenfreude, of course, but more as a reassurance that we are not, you know, freaks.

I am mildly aggrieved that nobody told me it was International Say Something Stupid Week. And yet what a week of utterances it has been. All kinds of stupid, which for the purposes of this column I will condense into three: Political Stupid, Academic Stupid, and WTF Stupid.

THE backpackers who got naked on the sacred mountain in Borneo aren’t a great advert for the phenomenon we call ‘gap year’.

One of the most unwavering let’s-not-go-there subjects in the history of let’s-not-go-there is prostitution.

I TUNED into BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, because it was about Ireland, and I still had that buoyant feeling from last week, says Suzanne Harrington.

I’ve never voted in Ireland because I left for good in my teens. I didn’t leave for economic reasons; I had a perfectly good job, unlike many of my peers during the late Eighties recession. No, I left for social reasons.

THE ARTIST David Hockney thinks gay people today are boring because they “want to be ordinary — they want to fit in.”