If the quantity of voice notes I send daily is anything to go by, I am developing an unhealthy dependence on them

On a recent episode of one of my favourite podcasts, the High Low, the journalists Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes discussed the increasing popularity of sending voice notes on WhatsApp.

Afterwards, I scrolled back through my old Chats, and found them to be littered with voice notes, which was striking to me for one reason — I hate talking on the phone.

We didn’t have a house number when I was a child because my father found the idea of being easily contactable ‘unnecessary’, so I missed out on the formative experience of spending hours and hours chatting to my friends after school (“and how do you still have anything to talk about? Didn’t you spend the whole day together?”) and being yelled at by my parents for running up huge phone bills.