From emails to ‘breaking news’ alerts to texts, our phones come under a bombardment of notifications these days. But there’s one kind that always brightens my day – the one that tells me that a friend has sent me a voice note.

This, however, seems to make me unusual. ‘I don’t want to hear your mini-podcast,’ complains Emma Brockes in the Guardian ; voice notes are ‘self-indulgent’, sniffs Anniki Sommerville in the i Paper ; and the Independent’s Lucie Tobin denounces them as ‘rude’ and ‘invasive’. In the latest issue of The Spectator , Mary Killen advises a correspondent who’s had enough of them to update their WhatsApp profile ‘to clarify their tastes… “please do not leave voice notes”’.

But Mary does acknowledge, at least, that ‘Voice notes are like Marmite’ – you love th

See Full Page