Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never really got to grips with text speak.

I can just about manage ‘c u tmrw’ but I can’t bring myself to put ‘l8r’ or any other daft misspelled abbreviations you’re supposed to text. I don’t know how to text a smiley face, or a sad one, and I refuse to do predictive texting because I don’t want my mobile reading my mind.

Having an English degree, and earning my living as a writer means I value words too much to demean them. If that sounds pretentious – or ‘prtnshs’ – so be it.

Texting can be convenient, but I also find it a bit of a nuisance, and most text slang passes me by. So when I told my 12-year-old niece a funny tale recently and she simply said “lol” it took a few seconds for the penny to drop. Instead of actually laughing, Ellie said the text slang for ‘laugh out loud’.

Apparently, if something is really funny she says ‘rofl’ which means ‘rolling on floor laughing’.

I assume her generation now thinks in textisms. With the Oxford English Dictionary recently including ‘initialisms’ such as ‘lol’ and ‘OMG’, it seems to have become perfectly acceptable to substitute full words for text speak. I pity poor teachers who have to mark essays and exams littered with jumbled letters and numbers – would Shakespeare recognise ‘2b r nt 2b’ as his own work?

If you prised their mobile phone from their stiff little fingers, for most teenagers and pre-teens it would be like sawing off an arm.

When I tried telling Ellie, who has been known to text a friend in the same room, that I managed to get through my childhood and adolescence without a mobile, she looked at me blankly. It was beyond her range of comprehension.

Whenever there’s a depiction of Eighties culture, whether a comedy sketch or a gritty drama, there’s usually someone clutching an early mobile the size of a modest bungalow.

“OMG, remember when mobiles were that huge?” someone usually pipes up.

Well no, actually. I grew up in the Eighties and didn’t see a single person with a mobile phone. I remember walkie-talkies, and CB radio, but mobiles were a thing of the future.

The only people who had those brick-like contraptions that have come to define the Eighties were city slickers called Rupert, who wore Eton ties, red braces and said ‘yah’. There wasn’t anyone like that where I grew up.

Never mind mobiles – not everyone had landlines. “Are you on the phone?” people used to ask.

It seems laughable now. Or, as Ellie would say, ‘lol’.