It started with slow food, a rebellion by people who stared glumly at yet another griddled beef patty with supersized fries, cradled in cardboard, and shrieked: “We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.” Slow parenting - a movement to liberate children from a frenetic circuit of after-school tennis, Suzuki violin, Kumon maths, piano and expressive dance - followed. It spawned slow correspondence: letters written (and read) at leisure, rather than frantically thumb-stabbed text messages. It even spread to slow art, work summarised by the Australian critic Robert Hughes, as art that says: “Not so fast, buster”; art that “doesn't get its message across in ten seconds”.

And now? Now we have slow public transport - an art that the British had thought they had already mastered, until this month's introduction of free nationwide bus passes for pensioners gave a fresh reason to purr about it being much better to travel than to arrive. These new passes have, as we report today, made it possible for the retired to plot a course from Land's End to John o' Groats without it costing them a penny - even if the trip does take a week, and 40 buses, owing to bus routes as tangled as a plate of spaghetti.

Just this week the Government advised people to prepare for the “cliff edge” of retirement, after it found that many people over 55 felt “lost” at the prospect of stopping work. Now they have a way to fill those yawning years of retirement: catch a bus! Take a month to visit the grandchildren, even though they live just down the road. Stop and smell the roses? At your new dawdling pace, you can now actually watch them growing.