WHICH among small, portable modern products would you regard as most sinister and dangerous?

The health police would nominate, without hesitation, a packet of cigarettes. I would say at once that the most destructive, anti-social and positively satanic of modern inventions is the mobile phone.

Everybody is irritated by the noise of these wretched gadgets in the street and especially on trains; and the first sure law of mobile phonery is that you will never, ever, hear anyone say anything interesting into one. But the disruption extends a lot further. I have had mobiles go off during fashionable weddings and I admit that the last time this happened I completely lost my rag and called out to a full church: "If that happens again, I'll stop the marriage!"

For sheer unbelievability and rudeness off the top of the Richter scale, I actually had a woman come to the altar rail to receive Holy Communion one Thursday lunchtime, and even as she held out one hand to receive the Blessed Sacrament, she employed the other to take a call on her mobile.

I heard a report that the Queen has developed a brilliant style to disarm these anti-social idiots who can't seem to go more than ten minutes without talking over the mobile. One was being presented to the Queen when his mobile went off. "Oh do please answer it," she said. "It's bound to be someone important!"

The first thing that needs to be pointed out about mobile phones is that they have little to do with normal communications. Well, very occasionally they might be employed to answer to an emergency: "I'm sorry I can't come to the nightclub - my pet monkey is on fire." But you don't hear that sort of thing very often. What you get is some numbskull piece of inconsequentiality such as: "I've asked Karen to tell Sharon that Kevin won't be at the disco." Big deal.

In short, mobile phones are not about communication at all: they are about self-advertisement. To be constantly on the mobile is a way of saying: "Look at me!" And it's all part of the babyish culture in which people are panic-stricken unless they're speaking to someone all the time.

But the worst aspect of the mobile is that it threatens to destroy normal human society. Consider this: whenever someone's mobile goes off, the person receiving the call always takes it. This ensures that the distant, as yet unknown, caller takes precedence over the real-life company. And this is a preposterous lack of courtesy. It is as if every time you spoke to me I chose to ignore you and turned to speak to someone else.

Back in the 1950s an eminent neurologist said that the increasing amount of gratuitous noise in the environment would have very bad consequences for our mental health. What would that doctor say if he could see us now?

If I were dictator of England, I would ban mobile phones except for emergencies. Anyone using the gadget to utter such rubbish as: "I'm on a train" would be sentenced summarily to jail with six months' hard labour.

Ring tones are more antisocial than bad breath.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.