It used to be as a child, once a year or once every other year, there was a deceased gerbil or a hamster to bury in the garden. If you knew no better than to take your guinea pig for a walk using a kitchen-string lead, these ceremonies came round with alarming regularity. The more morbid-slash-formal of my pals used to line a shoebox with tissues, or tissue paper or, on one occasion, ivory satin, and these boxes would be laid to rest in the garden.

Sometimes this was accompanied by a little gathering and a spiritual but non-denominational song such as “We Shall Overcome”. I don’t think words appraising the character merits of Snuggles were necessarily uttered but I might be wrong. He was wild and spiteful if the truth be known. He bit! But there was a dim sense of nature and rites of passage. There might be a cake afterwards. Nobody’s perfect.

I was thinking of small boxes with strange functions this week as I found myself dreaming of a “phone hutch”. A phone hutch is a box in which people have to stow their mobile telephones when I say so. We could all put our phones in it from 5pm to 8pm, was my thinking, check them between 8pm and 9.30pm, and then back in they would go until morning. I would start and encourage others to follow. It’s the way forward, I am certain. I think in 10 years’ time most civilised people won’t let their children have smartphones as there will be evidence to prove the damage they do to concentration and communication skills.

I am too attached to my phone myself. It can bring me comfort; all those nice little messages popping into my hand and heart all day long can be consoling, for they feel like the opposite of neglect. Yet it brings great stress also. If there are situations with minor irritations attached they can take on the proportions of mountain ranges when you don’t allow yourself to forget about them for more than a minute at a time. If you are at all prone to wondering what others think of you or how often they do, a smartphone does not help.

In the past there was the romance of miscommunication, for it was possible to believe that people were trying and failing to reach you. Does anyone remember the way the phone always rang the minute you stepped into the bath? Do you remember running a bath specially to make the phone go? Now, if someone wants you, they can always get you. And if someone doesn’t want to reach you, there are at least five different ways for them to make this known. That’s brutal.

I found an empty shoebox and covered it in blue-and-white sticky-back plastic, but when I put the box on table it was so picnic-y and inviting-looking it kind of called out “open me up” rather than “touch me at your peril”. I needed something more secure, something to save me from myself, something really safe. A safe! I started searching for safes online.

People who work for insurance companies sometimes say to me, “Everyone needs to have a safe because if you are burgled, no thief will believe you don’t have a safe and the burglars will think you are lying and this will make them angry. You want the burglar to get angry? I don’t think so. So what you need to do is have a safe with 500 pounds in cash in it. You take the thief to the safe, he gets the cash, and then he won’t be over the moon but he’ll be reasonably happy nine times out of 10.”

I then like to point out all the ways this scenario doesn’t make sense, apart from, perhaps, to the insurers.

The trouble was, all the table-top phone-safes online were hideous — worse than microwaves! They were grey and grim — awful phone-prisons, the small devices lined up inside, sad-faced, almost begging for release on appeal. I had pictured a red enamel receptacle, a sort of bright cherry red with quite a bit of white in it.

Then I spotted an eight-inch red metal box with two keys and a removable inner tray. People who bought this also shopped for petty cash vouchers and coffee granules. Why wouldn’t they? It was 8.19 pounds. I ordered it and it is sitting on the kitchen counter now looking cheery and a tiny bit stern. You can’t charge the phones while they are in it, as you can with the phone-safes, but we could drill some holes, maybe.

At five o’clock tonight I will put my phone in it and lock the lock solemnly, like a pallid Dickensian jailer. Tomorrow I will “invite” others to join me.

What’s the worst that can happen?

— Financial Times