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.

Little things like making clothes, baking bread, cooking, even useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home - that sort of time is gone. And the time we have? We're so exhausted, we want to let ourselves get sucked in to the escape world of TV. I'm speaking from experience; I'm not above all this.

When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.

The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.

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.

What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves