MY home telephone rang. And rang and rang. Clearly, this was a cold-caller who was not going to give up easily.

It turned out, however, to be the Sunday Herald editor, asking in his characteristically robust fashion why I wasn’t in the office.

Well, I began. You wanted an article on how consumer apps and websites are now so ubiquitous that we don't have to leave the house. I just thought I’d take it to its logical extent and write the piece on my laptop at home.

There was a lengthy pause. Good point, the editor conceded, grudgingly.

Such is the growth in specialist apps and websites including the newly-launched Amazon Fresh that, if we were so minded, we could languish at home all week - ordering stuff online, consuming entertain-ment, using FaceTime or Skype to communicate with the outside world, combing lists of new apps in search of ones that sound promising, all the while conscious that unless we are very careful our only human contact being with the delivery drivers who arrive on the doorstep.

Here we look at some of the ways in apps and websites make it possible for us to become virtual her-mits.

GROCERIES

AS if the Big Four supermarkets didn't have enough competition in the shape of Lidl and Aldi, and changing shopping habits (out goes the big weekly shop, in come 'little and often' visits to local stores), Amazon is now taking to the online supermarket service. Amazon Prime customers in central and east London are now able to order a full weekly shop and get it delivered the same day. As the experts at Retail Week observed recently: "The extensive Amazon Fresh proposition will provide further head-aches for the UK’s established grocery retailers including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons, who have already been battered by a perfect storm of changing consumer habits, the growth of online re-tail, food price deflation and oversized stores that have become out of kilter with time-pressed cus-tomers shopping missions."

Amazon Fresh hasn't yet set a specific date to roll out to the rest of the UK. "We are launching with a comprehensive offer in a limited area and will take our time to hone our service," spokesperson Ajay Kavan told the BBC. There are already lots of interesting grocery apps out there, of course.

Ocado's smartphone and tablet app allows you to browse thousands of items even when offline, and offers in-depth nutritional and dietary information for your shopping. We Deliver Local, launched in 2011, delivers produce from your local butcher, baker, fishmonger, greengrocer and convenience store. The bottom line is, who needs to get out and about by physically wandering around a super-market these days?

WORK

IT all depends on your job, of course. If you're a doctor, a nurse, a gardener, a delivery driver, a train driver, an airline pilot or cabin-crew member, a shop worker, a road worker, a policeman or an ambu-lance driver, it will be difficult to put together a persuasive argument to your line-manager as to why you should be allowed to work from home. Other jobs, though, lend themselves quite nicely to the idea. A TUC survey last summer found that four million employees, or 13.7% of the workforce, work from home. All journalists need, really, is a laptop, a phone and an internet connection. There are downsides, though: allowing yourself to become immersed in the gloomy depths of the daytime TV schedules, for example, or answering the door to the postman at lunchtime and realising with a start that you're still in your Winnie the Pooh sleepwear. Also, beware the risks of opening that bottle of wine at midday and thinking, a glass or two won't hurt. Slurring your speech when you're trying to ex-plain to your editor at 2pm why you're not in the office is rarely a good idea.

FOOD

WE'VE long been accustomed to the practice of phoning the local pizza shop, or Indian or Chinese takeaway or restaurant, to order a home delivery, then, half an hour later, answering the phone to patiently explain to the delivery driver exactly where your house is. All sorts of new names have how-ever, emerged via apps and websites.

Just Eat, for example, describes itself as a champion of online takeaway ordering: 13 markets, more than 64,000 restaurants, over 14.2 million customers worldwide. Just Eat UK, launched 10 years ago, offers food from more over 30,000 restaurants. hungryhouse has more than 10,000 restaurants on its platform. Deliveroo invites you to type in your postcode on its homepage for a list of restaurants that will deliver to you: you choose a restaurant, put together your order, and enter your address and payment details. Uber, until now best-known for its taxi-booking app, has just launched UberEats, a food delivery service in London, using moped and bicycle couriers to sell food from 150 restaurants in central London.

DATING APPS

UNEASY about the prospect of venturing out into local pubs and clubs in the hope of meeting that spe-cial someone? Nervous about how you’ll come across, about having to make small talk? Fret no more. There are all sorts of dating apps out there that make contact easier and less painful. Theoretically, at least. Thing is, is you do meet someone who would like to meet you, that would entail leaving the house. Cue worries about making small talk, etc, etc. Best just to stay in and order a home delivery. That expensive new Game of Thrones boxset won’t watch itself, you know.

CLOTHES

SAID the BBC recently: “New figures suggest almost two thirds of shoppers who bought women's clothes online in the last six months sent at least one item back.” We’re assuming that all those shop-pers who bought women’s clothes were actually women. But the story suggests that online clothes shopping – browsing apps and websites, and ordering stuff to be sent direct to your door -has become on-trend. As marketing expert Catherine Shuttleworth told the Beeb: "The Smartphone revolution has made shopping ever nearer - it is right next to our purse or our wallet. That immediacy and ability to buy things whenever you want is really important to that generation." The Economist said this week about online shopping’s impact on the High Street: “Consumers, especially the young, now expect “omnichannel” retailing, to be able to switch seamlessly between purchasing on their laptops, on their mobiles and in bricks-and-mortar stores. Retailers that are slow to develop a good online offering will struggle, or worse.”

CULTURE

MAYBE it’s an age thing, but there’s nothing to beat the experience of wandering around a good bookshop, or music shop, and snaffling a few more purchases to add to the vast pile you already have at home. Now, of course, you can download books, and films, and music direct to your smartphone or tablet without leaving the house. You can stream music wirelessly to every room in your house. Spoti-fy and Apple’s Beats 1 have become huge, enabling you to enjoy a world of music on your smartphone. Ultimately, there’s something quaintly old-fashioned about having rooms devoted to books or CDs. Maybe that explains the baffled look I get from my young niece and nephew whenever they visit.

RELATIVES

NO need to leave the house to meet them, either. Unless it’s at a wedding or a funeral, in which case you probably have no choice. FaceTime and Skype are among the many ways in which, from your own settee, you can keep up with relatives and catch up on all the frankly dull gossip you have unaccounta-bly missed out on.

HOLIDAYS/ FOREIGN TRAVEL

YOU can now even sample overseas cities without actually going abroad. Using Google Street View on your laptop, phone or tablet allows you to walk down streets that it would otherwise cost a small for-tune to visit. I’ve just walked down Collins Avenue, in Miami Beach, New York’s Fifth Avenue and Bar-celona’s La Rambla. Virgin Holidays is among the companies exploring the possibilities afforded by vir-tual reality, VR. Waiting customers have a ‘try before you buy’ option thanks to a virtual tour of desti-nations, among them Mexico’s Riviera Maya, caught on a special 360-degree rig and GoPro cameras. Elsewhere, Smart2VR, ‘the world's first Self Service mobile Virtual Reality platform’, allows you to explore such destinations as Ibiza and Lago Maggiore.