Kate Winslet, in an interview to promote Steve Jobs, her new movie about the legendary Apple designer, said she is clamping down on her children’s use of smartphones and tablets and will not allow them to use social media because of its harmful qualities.

Fair enough, although for Winslet to say this while mythologising Jobs is like denouncing alcohol while asking us to watch a film on the life of Jack Daniels. But what I find disturbing is her claim that playing I-Spy on long car journeys is more important. Is she kidding? I-Spy? That’s far more dangerous and unwholesome than iPad enslavement. With its insidious little rhyme that you have to say in full, instead of just giving the first letter, it has a horribly addictive quality, tempting the player into ever more obscure clues.

I remember playing this game on a long night-time journey with my sister in the back of our parents’ car. I said I spied something beginning with D. No one could get it, but no one wanted to give up. After almost two hours of fractious guessing, my sister finally asked me what the hell it was. Darkness, I said smugly. With a scream, she simply slapped me in the face. I don’t blame her. I wish there had been iPads in 1974 so we could have just played Angry Birds.

A healing moment

I have just returned from Mumbai, a gigantic and thrilling city I’d never visited before, where I have been a guest at the film festival. The ceremony took place at the Gateway of India – the Raj monument built to commemorate the visit of George V in 1911 – which was spectacularly lit in the evening gloom. This was in fact something of a healing event for Mumbai. It was the first time the Gateway had been made publicly accessible in this way since the terror assaults of 2008: it had been the starting point for the gunmen.

I was taken on a tour of downtown south Mumbai, including affected places such as the railway station and bars, and if there was any psycho-geographic hum of remembered violence around these places, I didn’t notice it. Life goes on, although precautions persist. I was taken to a lavish party at Antilia, home of the mogul Mukesh Ambani and the world’s second most expensive private home after Buckingham Palace. Next to waiters bearing trays of drinks, there were two guys with machine guns.

Flight of reality

Returning from Mumbai on a long-haul flight was a piquant experience, knowing that airlines are going to axe the little seat-back entertainment screens, planning instead to stream content wirelessly to people’s tablets. It’s a shame. The little screens have something eerie about them (Will Self said it was like watching the dreams of the person next to you), and fiddling with the manky little grey earphone set and finding where to plug it in is a link to the era when there was one single inflight movie shown on a series of pulldown white screens.

Nowadays, there is only one communal screen experience for travellers, and that’s the map showing where you are. That’s what you finally find yourself staring at numbly at the end of the flight – exhausted, frazzled, all entertainment-ed out. It has those baffling stats about temperature and speed, accompanied aurally by the weird sound of rushing air outside the fuselage, and that little plane avatar inching across the screen. After 10 hours, when you’ve watched three films in a row and finished your paperback, you have a wan need to reconnect with reality. The little map with the little plane is it. The last gasp of lo-fi airline entertainment.