One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?

There are a lot of little tricks you can do to inject a bit more time into the day. Most important is limiting yourself to a 40 hour week, not working 50 hours or 60 or 70. It's just crazy. It's actually irresponsible to you and irresponsible to your family and friends. Why should your employer's profits be more important than your own family? You're not even going to get any of the profits - all you get is not losing your job. It's a very negative system.

The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions.

Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.

Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?

By taking out a loan, I am committing myself to years of interest repayments, and therefore to years of wage slavery. And the UK has been borrowing like crazy since 1694, when the Bank of England was invented. This means that we are locked into high taxation to pay for 300 years of wars and other costly and generally disastrous state enterprises.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.