Back Story Page 0,134

very suddenly. It’s like the credit crunch – there’s no real warning. In hindsight, there were signs. There was something slightly low rent about that Hilton hotel on the left and just a suggestion of flaky paint on Royal Crescent to the right, but nothing to prepare the casual pedestrian for what happens next. The tree-lined avenue of stucco houses ends abruptly and a bleak and vast plain of tarmac is revealed: a huge and alienating roundabout that forms a barrier between leafy Holland Park and affordable Shepherd’s Bush.

I stop and wait at a pelican crossing and, unable to endure a moment’s inactivity somewhere so unpleasant, get my phone out to check for messages. No texts and no voicemails but, because this is an iPhone, I can check for e-mails as well and I establish the slightly stressful fact that I’ve got two new ones before the lights change and I have to start moving.

Marvellous. Now I’m wondering what those e-mails can be. All the little issues of background stress – the people I haven’t got back to, the decisions that broadcasters have yet to make that affect me, even potential family crises, crowd into my head in a way they wouldn’t if I didn’t know I had messages. That’s the trap – I check them in the hope of the reassuring feeling that no one’s tried to be in touch – but that doesn’t work if someone has. For years I resisted a smartphone because e-mail, I felt, was something that should always be able to keep until I got home. If it’s urgent, let people ring or text. An e-mail is like a letter – people shouldn’t expect a response in less than a day or two. But, if they get wind of the fact that you can receive e-mails 24/7, the timescale on which they expect a response suddenly shortens. A 24-hour delay becomes discourteous. Great, another massive boon from the monthly bill.

I’m not in fact a Luddite. They actually destroyed machines rather than just moaning about them. But I’m not even a Luddite in the modern sense of someone who rails against technological advance. A lot of people assume that I am, but I’ve basically got all the stuff – a big desktop computer and a tiny laptop, a digital camera, an iPhone and a Kindle. I love my Kindle, in particular. I genuinely think it’s nearly as good as reading a book and it fits neatly in a jacket pocket. Paperbacks used to fit neatly into a jacket pocket before publishers collectively decided this was a design advantage of their product that was unfair on the rest of the market and decided to make books annoyingly slightly bigger to give TV and video games a look-in. Very sporting. But the makers of Kindles have cleverly borrowed that feature from the old sort of paperback and combined it with the ability to contain a whole library of reading. They’ve even solved the problem of making the screen visible in bright light. It’s a terrific machine.

Of course I hate myself for liking it. I want to prefer books in the same way that, as a child, I wanted to like porridge. It seems to fit my image better – the slightly tweedy person with strong views. Liking a Kindle is neither tweedy nor a strong view. You can’t get strident about it. I suppose I could get strident about all the people who idiotically hate Kindles – except I don’t think that’s idiotic. I think it’s born out of fear that reading and books, cornerstones of our civilisation, are under threat. I totally get that – I just happen to think the Kindle’s a neat little device.

The other way to go, and there’s a lot of pressure on men to be like this, would be to become a gadget fanatic. That’s another thing that some people assume I am: if not a Luddite then a geek who would love technology to a slightly weird degree. It seems I don’t come across as someone with much of a sense of proportion.

Or maybe that’s just the culture. We’re not interested in moderation. You get that with TV all the time – every new show is on a knife-edge. If it falls one way, it’s a massive hit; if it goes the other, it’s a humiliating flop. The whole industry and its critical scrutineers seem blind to all the things that are kind of fine. But I’d say that was