I was in a sublime concert of choral music the other Sunday, cantatas written by the supreme master of sublime music, Johann Sebastian Bach.

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But next to me on the pew in the cathedral in Canberra were two people glued to their phones. I don't think they were texting, but they were scrolling through endless pictures and messages on, I guess, Snapchat, that ultimate app for the brain-dead.

I finally leant over and whispered to the boy next to me: "You can't do that." He looked at me with utter contempt and kept at it, so I waited a minute and then repeated the message accompanied by a jab. He put the phone away, as did his girlfriend on the other side from me.

I don't think I'm just being a grumpy old man by objecting to people reading phones during performances. It's distracting to see a flashing light out of the corner of one's eyes when the music's the thing.

Or the movie - though I fear I'm fighting a losing battle in the cinema.

I do ask people near me to stop texting, but I feel that my displeasure is less acceptable - and more obviously grumpy - when it's in a Hollywood blockbuster than in a slow French or Japanese art house film (one made by an auteur in homage (with a silent h) to another auteur - you know the type).

I did bang the back of the chair of the man in front of me with a shining phone screen during a cinema screening of a Wagner opera - and I am completely unapologetic about that.

And I don't condemn the man who pepper-sprayed a phone user in Los Angeles. "A 34-year-old man from California has been arrested after allegedly pepper-spraying a person at a movie theater who was using his cellphone during the film, according to authorities," The Guardian reported.

Arrested?! He........

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