You know how one thing leads to another. Someone uses an unusual word, like “olfactory”, and within days you have seen it in six other places. Well, over the past week I’ve had that kind of repeated encounter with possibly the most trivial trivia known to mankind. Statistics about e-mails. First my attention was caught by an article about the Gillette takeover. A US Government official had demanded access to all of Gillette’s corporate e-mails for the period in question. But he had been rebuffed by a judge, simply because his demand was ludicrous. Gillette’s staff, it seems, churn out no fewer than 14 million e-mails a month. Yes, 14 million. Assume that each takes just 25 seconds to write and five seconds to read and delete. My maths may not be as sharp as Gillette’s finest blades, but I reckon that still amounts to 1.4 million employee-hours a year.

Yet no sooner had I cranked my jaw back to its usual anchorage, an inch below my upper dentures, than I came across a yet-more-startling statistic. Tesco is now sending 20 million e-mails to its customers each month, making Gillette’s execs look like slouches in their bestowal of cyberspatial salutations. And then, because all bizarre things come in threes, my eye alighted on the e-mail statistic to cap them all. Bill Gates now receives so many e-mails — four million a day — that he employs a whole secretariat to fillet his in-box. (Connoisseurs of irony will be delighted to know that 95 per cent of its contents are spam-mail.)

Compared with that, the rest of humanity may seem to have escaped lightly. OK, we generate 50 billion e-mails a day. Yet that works out at only eight for every man, woman and child on the planet. But of course we haven’t escaped lightly. The sad fact is that e-mails — hailed only ten years ago as the greatest advance in communication since the invention of the V-sign — are now regularly cited as the biggest cause of stress in the workplace. It’s not just the quantity of the stuff. Nor the mind-numbing pointlessness of getting an e-mail from someone sitting four yards away, comprising the query “can we talk?”. (Well, yes we can — and, until about 1998, we did.) Nor the pathological compulsion to open each new missive the moment that “you’ve got mail!” flashes up — only to discover the fascinating information that Barry in accounts has mislaid his sunglasses. Nor the pressure to reply instantly to every e-mail or risk being written off as inefficient, lazy, standoffish or just drunk in the afternoons. Nor the converse disquiet at getting no response from Shirley in head office, to whom you e-mailed a flirtatious suggestion more than 12 minutes ago. Nor even the agonising realisation that you have just committed the ultimate act of 21st-century self-destruction, and pressed the button that sent your devastatingly sardonic commentary on your boss’s latest rubbish idea winging merrily to . . . your boss.

No, what really saps the mental energy is the colossal effort that goes into composing these things. This upstart medium is already bedecked with more stylistic conventions than a Baroque opera. Wit, brevity and spontaneity are its ostensible essence. But, as any writer knows, those are the very qualities that take longest to concoct. Even the e-mail’s essential informality can be desperately hard to craft. I once began an e-mail to a bishop with the words “Dear Bishop”. He replied with “Hi Richard”. Not wishing to appear aloof, I responded with the fashionable “Hey!”, whereupon his next missive trumped it with “Hiya”. Searching for an even more genial way of expressing our blossoming comradeship, I then deployed the opening my daughter uses in her e-mails to me: the delightful “Wassup!” Whoops. I never heard from him again.

All of which prompts a query: is the e-mail the boon or bane of modern life? It’s supposed to bring us closer, but doesn’t it do the reverse? Isn’t it the ideal mode of communication for the dissembler, the procrastinator and those who love to project a carefully-manicured image of themselves? And don’t most of us use e-mails to insulate ourselves from truly spontaneous interchanges — what we used to call “conversations”? At least one businessman thinks so. The tycoon John Caudwell banned his employees from using e-mails at all. They had to talk to each other and their customers. He claims that this improved efficiency and morale. Of course, the fact that he owns a mobile-phone company makes him a not entirely disinterested party. Even so, he has a point. A three-minute chat, enriched by all the myriad nuances of vocal and facial expression, can convey ten times more information than a three-day exchange of e-mails.

My hunch is that, in ten years, the e-mail will seem as quaint a cul-de-sac in the history of communication as the Sinclair C5 was in the history of transport. Well, roll on that day. I want to see the bishop’s expression when I “wassup” him face to face.

Anything you can't do, we can do better

Good to know that however bad the Tube gets, it is matched, fiasco by fiasco, by New York’s transit system. Last Thursday, along with thousands of others trying to reach their flights out of JFK, I was trapped on the Big Apple’s brand-new “Air Train”, a fancypants elevated railway that is supposed to whisk passengers painlessly to their terminals. Except, as happened that night, when the trains get stuck on the gradients. Well, New Yorkers have many sterling qualities, but patience isn’t top of the list. As the motionless minutes ticked by, one native let rip. “This is the United States of America,” she snarled at an Air Train minion. “They run things better than this in . . .” — and here she searched for the most insulting possible comparison — “. . .in England!” This monstrous slur was too much for one British businessman standing nearby. “I assure you, madam,” he said, with the frosty hauteur of a proud Englishman, “that they do not.”

Dishonourable gongs

So 25 of the life peers created by Tony Blair have been Labour Party donors. The only surprise is that it’s only 25. Our honours “system” has long been a tawdry cover-up for shameless cronyism. The vast majority of those who receive the biggest gongs are fat cats who are already handsomely paid for what they do. The way to restore credibility would be to award honours only to people who do years of voluntary work, or who make outstanding gifts to charity. And by charity I don’t mean the fund for keeping Tony’s spin-doctors in natty suits.

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