The Wrap has to own up: He's a wilfer.

Not just a run-of-the-mill wilfer, mind you. A serial wilfer.

If there’s a spot of wilfing to be done, The Wrap is guilty as charged, m’lord.

Wilfing is the term applied to those who aimlessly flit about the Internet, surfing up blind alleys, following trails that lead nowhere, and wasting time by following a thread... and then forgetting where they started out in the first place.

Soon there will be special homes for the wilfully-impaired, where all the computers will be Internet restricted to just one site, Wilfers Anonymous.

Time passes in a flash when you are wilfing. And invariably you end up asking yourself, why I am on Google Earth when I was meant to be checking out a cheap flight to Bali?

Wilfers have no sense of shame. They justify their activities by claiming it is all in the name of research.

They never stop to ask whether they could be doing something more useful with their lives: like rattling a charity tin in their local shopping centre to help starving orphans in Africa.

(Africa? That reminds me, I’ll just click on the latest news in the Botswana Bugle, and then maybe check a Live Cam in Cape Town).

Now, where was I? According to a survey for a financial website, almost seven in 10 Internet users admit to the newly named habit of wilfing.

The study of 2,400 people carried out by YouGov found more than a quarter of Internet users wilf - a rough acronym of What Was I Looking For? - for two days every month.

Shopping is the online activity most likely to make users wilf. Men are more likely to admit to being wilfers than women. A third of the men questioned said the habit had damaged their relationship with a partner.

A possible cause of this was that almost one in five men confess to being distracted from work or study by adult entertainment sites.

The good news is that wilfing is a habit people tend to grow out of. Internet users aged 55 or over were three times less likely to wilf than those aged under 25.

Jason Lloyd, from moneysupermarket.com, told London’s Daily Telegraph: "The internet was designed to make it easier for people to access the information they need quickly and conveniently.

"Although people log on with a purpose, they are now being offered so much choice and online distraction that many forget what they are there for, and spend hours aimlessly wilfing instead.”

I plead guilty. I was looking for the definition of wisdom, which wasn't very wise, I know, and ended up scrolling through all words beginning with “w” – wilfing wasn't one of them though.