The mobile telephone demonstrates both the choices and the curses of modern society. The ability to make a telephone call from wherever one happens to be is extraordinary, but the curse of sitting in a restaurant and having someone at the adjacent table blabbering away on their mobile during lunch really is a headache.
What can one do about this? Well, perhaps that brilliant restaurateur, Derry Clarke, of Dublin's L'Ecrivain restaurant has the answer. At the foot of his lunch and dinner menus, underneath the information that L'Ecrivain nobly doesn't apply any service charge to wines or drinks (why doesn't everyone follow this example) and where we are told that everything is cooked to order, there is a discreet little line which reads: "In consideration for other guests, please confine the use of mobile phones to reception area only."
Brilliant. This gets the bleepers and buzzers out of the atmosphere of the dining room and lets them get on with whatever they have to do, while the rest of us get on with having a good time. L'Ecrivain, 112 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin 2, tel: 01-6611919