JUST before the train rolled out of St Pancras, a family of four sat down across from us.

The dad, a tubsy, goateed fellow who looked like someone who starts lots of sentences with "I'm not being funny, but ...", had taken out a mobile phone that looked like it could pilot a 747. He'd started watching a football match online. Loudly.

My wife leaned over the aisle and, in the voice she usually reserves for the people at the power company, asked him if perhaps he could locate and deploy some headphones.

"Oh, don't like the football, do you?" he said.

She pressed on, but he didn't take kindly to the notion that the presence of others might preclude his listening to Liverpool v Man City at the volume of his choosing. He began loudly suggesting that we could go sit in another carriage if we didn't like it. The idea apparently being that any carriage in which he plants his ample frame automatically becomes a travelling Sky Sports pub.

The best bit was that tubsy's two school-aged kids actually seemed to understand the etiquette. His daughter in particular kept shushing him when the footie got too loud.

Earlier in the weekend we'd been in Canterbury, where an otherwise lovely boat tour of the River Stour was marred slightly by the woman who considered mid-tour to be an excellent time for a mobile-phone chat or three. While in a rowboat. With eight other people and a tour guide trying to guide the tour over her voice.

This could be the point where I suggest chucking all mobile phones into the sea. But I won't.

See, technology doesn't change things. It enhances them. If you're already a gregarious chatter, Twitter offers you more gregarious chat. If you're a exhibitionist, now you can be an exhibitionist on your creepy blog.

And if you're already an idiot, well, now you can be an idiot chuntering into an overpriced mobile phone while everybody else stares at the back of your head while indulging their spontaneous combustion fantasies.

People who use obnoxious phones obnoxiously are like throwbacks to a simpler time; throwbacks to an age when people knew all their neighbours, including the ones who needed a serious kicking from the village mule. An obnoxiously used iPhone is like a little hat that says "Hi, I'm a twit".

Many thanks to everyone who e-mailed in last week suggesting new Nottingham stadium names to compete with Leicester's proposed King Power Stadium.

But there can be only one winner. And that winner is regular reader and friend of the column Roy Manterfield.

Considering Nottingham companies, he suggests Abacus Lighting.

"You could count on Abacus Stadium," he notes.

Not doing it for you? Roy's got more.

"Warburtons Ltd? They may want a slice of the action, but the players might loaf around instead of earning a crust. No, a half-baked idea.

"How about Bell Fruit Stadium? Could be a bit of a gamble, but instead of a sign saying the Trent End, you could have one saying the Bell … ah, no, you couldn't erect that, could you?"

Roy ends with a legitimately excellent idea.

"Anyway, if this was a legitimate naming contest it would have to be Castle Rock Brewery. Castle Rock Stadium is just perfect." Roy. You win.