Oh how they laughed. It was one of my more inglorious moments – and I have to admit, I've had a few – and, unfortunately, a small crowd waiting for a bus at midnight witnessed it. I had stumbled off the kerb in search of a PokeStop, my eyes locked on my screen, when I fell, rolling head over feet. My friend, a barrister whose view of all popular culture after Jane Austen veers from bemusement to contempt, stared down at me, yelling: "YOU ARE IN A BUS LANE!"

I could not stop laughing. After just an hour spent playing Pokemon, a mostly respectable mother of two, I had already become a cliche.

The stories of Pokemon Go fools, bumping into walls, crashing into cars, falling off bicycles, walking across TV sets, are legion. Just this week a 62-year-old New Yorker was chasing bouncing little monsters though woods when he got stuck in waist-deep mud and had to call 911.

It's not surprising though, given that there are 20 million or so of us walking around playing this augmented reality game – where cartoon characters we capture and battle with are superimposed on to our surroundings, viewed through mobile screens. As Om Malik wrote in the New Yorker: "To say it has spread like wildfire is to exaggerate the power of wildfires."