Advice for Heather Mills, and behind the cellphone psyche

Harry Mount’s column in The Daily Telegraph was a great laugh:

I once saw [Heather Mills] walking down Fifth Avenue in New York and was staggered by the height of her cheekbones and the depth of the groove beneath them.
   But when she opens her mouth—and keeps it open for 11 minutes, as she did outside the High Court—the spell is broken. You forget the cheekbones and drown in the ocean of self-pity pouring out of that pretty mouth.
   During the French state visit, clever Carla Bruni rarely broke the spell by talking. She realised, like the old pro supermodel she is, that all she has to do is look good and say nothing. …
   The real difference between them, though, is in what they say—or don’t say. The answer for Heather Mills in future is to do what John Galliano did with Carla Bruni's cinched Dior outfit—belt up.

   Thinking that was all that Mr Mount had to offer, I was pleasantly surprised by the final segment in his column:

A new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry claims that mobile phone addiction is a mental illness.
   I’m afraid the illness is incurable; it’s related to an addiction that's been around for ever—the addiction to self.
   People aren’t addicted to the phones themselves. They’re addicted to the attention they get from other people via their phones. Obsessive phoners send texts purely in the hope that they’ll get one back. They don’t ring people from the train to find anything out; only to get other people to listen to them saying nothing of any importance. Why is it that the person on the train is always doing the talking, and never the listening?

   I knew there was a reason I didn’t use cellphones.