STEPHEN JARDINE

WHEN my mother-in-law e-mailed me from her laptop, I realised something had fundamentally changed. If a woman who thinks enhancing the memory involves putting on her reading glasses can embrace cyberspace then new technology really has crossed the great divide. The computer was the final hurdle.

She's had a mobile phone for years but then, according to new figures, so has everyone. Latest statistics show there are now a remarkable 62 million mobile telephones in the UK. In other words, more mobiles than people.

And we are far from the fastest growing marketplace in the world. China is expected to have 400 million cell phone users by 2008. In Luxembourg, the mobile saturation rate means every person has 1.5 handsets on the go at any one time. In just 20 years, the mobile phone has gone from nowhere to iconic status as one of the greatest inventions of modern times.

When roving technology was being introduced, I too was making my debut reporting on the tough streets of Dundee. To ensure we were first with every story, a two-way radio was installed in the car used by reporters. Inevitably, it was utterly useless for communicating with the newsroom but perfectly tuned to interfere with every taxi and ambulance frequency in East Central Scotland. You can imagine how popular that made us.

A couple of years later in the better resourced world of television, an object appeared that looked like a large brick attached to a particularly cumbersome handbag but turned out to be a first generation Motorola mobile phone.

Instead of enhancing our newsgathering capability, it actually made the job much harder since most of our time on stories was spent wandering around looking for small hills or clambering on to walls with the aerial fully extended in a vain attempt to find one of the very few spots where there was enough signal to make a call. By the time you'd managed that the battery was dead, which meant returning to base and waiting two days for it to recharge.

How times change. Now mobiles come in all shapes but only small sizes. In no time at all they have become an essential part of the fabric of our lives.

Perhaps the speed of our conversion explains the love-hate relationship we have with them.

On a bad day they drag us kicking and screaming into other people's lives, leaving us seething on a train in the Waverley tunnel next to a fat sweaty man on his phone yelling: "I'm on the train, no the train, what . . ? I said the train."

Then there are the health fears surrounding mobile phones and the effects leaked electromagnetic radiation can have on the brain.

On top of all that we now have phone-based conspiracy theories, as seen in the new ITV series Mobiles, which started this week. But such paranoia makes it easy to ignore the remarkable contribution they make to our lives. As well as being an essential business tool and a lifeline for people in danger, mobile phones have changed the social dynamic of society for the better.

In an increasingly frantic and fragmented world, they allow us to return to old fashioned integrated forms of communication. By talk or text we can easily keep in touch with people against the flow of modern life.

The manufacturers can load mobiles with extra functions like music, video and internet capability, but that misses the simple and very basic reason why we love and rely on them so much - the mobile phone is the modern garden fence, letting us interact and carry out the social grooming that helps make human beings tick in an age when, without it, we would simply be far too busy.

If you doubt it is that important, try doing without your phone for a week and all will suddenly become clear.

I left mine at home the other day and it was sheer torture. Quite apart from having to do without all the numbers I needed, I spent the entire day convinced I would be missing a couple of crucial calls I had been waiting for all week.

And self-flagellation is only the beginning. That night the phone was full of messages from people growing increasingly exasperated with not getting an answer.

Thanks to the mobile, everyone wants a response and they want it now. All of a sudden it was clear why the good citizens of Luxembourg find it so handy to have more than one mobile phone.

Though why they choose to live in Luxembourg remains a mystery even the most sophisticated state-of-the-art technology cannot solve.