An advert comes on for i, ‘the new concise quality newspaper’. The TV commercial is full of busy, dynamic people with the caveat that they all have enough time to pose on an escalator, or while driving a black cab, for an advert. One woman, beset and befuddled by a meep-meep flu-voice redolent of a 1980s Tunes advert or Ed Miliband, sits on a bench with drizzle caking the air about her. In front of her sit a lunchbox and a child’s scooter. She’s eating outside on a winter’s day. She’s not busy, she’s unstable.

The people this is aimed at are the kind of faux-hectics who are constantly stopping throughout their day to fingerspittle into Spacebook or MyFace to show just how otherwise engaged they are. They are the man who keeps putting his tie backwards over his shoulder to appear windswept and frazzled, and the office woman in an unkind blouse who bangs the photocopy lid to make people see that she’s far too busy for menial tasks. In the advert, one of them is even Dom Joly, who hasn’t been busy since 1997.

Dan Gray has worked out how to save 57.75 minutes a year and he is not happy...

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The idea of i (the idea) is that it is a curtailed paper for those who just don’t have time to read full-length articles, in the same way that trousers are curtailed urinals for tramps who don’t have time to get to the McDonald’s toilets. It’s aimed to sit nicely, or shuffle agitatedly, in a world where every second counts. But in a country where people still have the time to watch The One Show – that halfwit nightly study in where it all went wrong for humanity – or pretend to care about tennis, is anyone really that busy?

Potato exhaust death
In a canteen recently I read a laminated sign that implored workers to pay using an in-house credit card system rather than cash. ‘A cash transaction takes 20 seconds, with a card it’s only 5’, it read, ‘Save time, use a card’.
Let’s just have a think about that. In what way would those stolen, cherished 15 seconds make a difference to your day? That’s 1 minute and 15 seconds per work canteen week. Five minutes a month. With holidays and Monday sickies, it’s less than an hour a year. An hour, the time it takes to drive to Glenrothes or instead die having stuck a potato in your exhaust pipe.

I worry (no, I do, I really do) about where all this unnecessary timesaving will lead. Capitalism has cottoned on to the fact that people like to be told they are busy and offered fake sympathy through slogans or images of actors running sweatily for a bus. Food is advertised not for its quality, but for how quickly it can rotate from corpse-frozen to putrid-melty-hot.

If everything continues in this manner, there will be a generation of people who’ve saved so much time that by the age of 48 they’ve got nothing left to do. It’ll be like when a meeting is unexpectedly called-off at work, only that feeling will last until death.

The revolution begins here: next time you see a person behind you in the street feigning a rush, slow down, straddle the pavement and dawdle hellishly. If you have a broadsheet newspaper on you to stretch out, then all the better. It might not change much, but it’ll be bloody funny.

Burns in English trousers
To a Burns Supper, that odd mix of poetry, patriotism and sheep. Every year I look forward to these January trysts with old wurds-worth himself. The evening’s stages allow me to enact my finest mental hypocrisies, usually as follows.

Arrive. Feel very English in trousers. Tartan everywhere. Must get some air. Never liked tartan. That’s better. Back in. Friendly noises. Paranoia that this is someone else’s ball. Someone kilted. Someone good. The kilted read jokes and call poems poy-ems. More paranoia: did she just slag-off the English? Haggis comes. Enjoy imagining what’s in it in a twisted way. I love this stuff. Why can’t I have it every day? Still can’t remember what neeps are. Nice though. Happy now. Convivial. Something’s bound to go wrong. Oh God, there’s not a Ceilidh afterwards is there? Oh help. No, just more talking. And some singing. And, and, do you know what? I love this. Burns wasn’t only a Scot, he was a radical. He was anyone’s and everyone’s and ours. And I love this country too. Must get a kilt for next year.