There was a time when sexual chemistry was established by the alpha male by banging the head of his female counterpart off a wall.

In fairness, Tom Burkinshaw got suspended for that, and Jenny Simms escaped with only minor cranial damage. The point is, times have changed. Flirting has evolved. Romantic comedies of meeting a girl in a coffee shop are becoming increasingly implausible.

The more realistic scenario is an anonymous Bluetooth group text before making a sharp and less humiliating exit. It isn’t electronics, domestic appliances or even fashion that is spearheading our entrance into the 21st century, flirting is light years ahead of its time. However, is this a good thing?

I, for one, love to flirt. Whether it’s the attractive girl on your daily commute, the old lady in the newsagents who says “if I was twenty years younger” every time you see her, or even the bloke at the gym, who you like to make feel uncomfortable, flirting is a sport I thoroughly enjoy. However, much like mime, ventriloquism and making fun of the less fortunate, it is fast becoming a dying art.

There was nothing more beautifully painful than the sight of a group of young girls crowding round a payphone, desperately trying not to giggle, as they ask a boy’s mother if they can speak to their son.

Granted, it was rarely my mother they were phoning but now is not the time for bitter nostalgia. The solitary uses of phone boxes to the youth of today are as see through urinals, or free hotel room for ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’. This is a generation, sadly, brought up differently. I like to call them ‘Generation Text’.

Mobile phones made flirting easy. Expensive; but easy. Texting rapidly became 21st century flirting. All groundwork has been done before a normal conversation even takes place. Tell your friends that your actually having telephone conversations with a girl and they’ll reply “Oh, it’s getting serious’.

Textual relationships are also a quick way of losing inhibitions at a far speedier rate.