I love using my phone at the dinner table and only a fool would try to ban them

I WAS five glasses deep into the new Beaujolais in The Royal Oak pub on Columbia Road in Shoreditch when I lost the game. It was 2014 and I reached for my phone stacked on top of the others, jenga'd precariously in the middle of the table.

- Max Wallis

"You lost!" my friend Tim said, with a wine-wide Cheshire Cat grin. "It's your round." The phone game had claimed its first victim of the night and that victim was me entirely unfairly, too, for someone who has the attention span of a mite and the forgetfulness of one, too.

A decade later and the phone game - an attempt at enforcing social etiquettes in east London boozers - has transformed into something else entirely. Our friends in Italy have introduced a novel form of bribery. At the entrance to AI Condominio on Via Guglielmo Marconi in Verona, diners are given the chance to "renounce technology", as though they are giving up computers for life. Phones are handed in. Gaols are locked. Keys are exchanged. Waiters then take the keys off punters and give them a bottle of vino. Diners are encouraged to focus more on the tortelloni al ragu, and each other, than what Aunt Joan is up to on Facebook. In fair Verona, no less.

Shakespeare might have talked about grudges and mutinies in the city in Romeo and Juliet, but perhaps he was really talking about iPhones.