Recently, I stepped off a train feeling drained and disgruntled. I’d spent a 30-minute journey with someone I knew, where I’d made sounds rather than words: ‘Mmmm,’ ‘Oof,’ ‘Euurgh.’ This was because I had barely had a chance to speak. I was caught in the vortex of someone else’s stream of consciousness. I felt that if I’d simply left the ‘conversation’ (in the loosest sense of the word) mid-flow, it wouldn’t have made any tangible difference. A smorgasbord of emotions flitted through me: tension, frustration, boredom and, bizarrely, a grudging admiration that someone could hold forth with such a blissful lack of awareness – a concept alien to me.
“Our fast-paced, screen-dominated lives have made us more impatient”
This incident was stacked on many others. Over
