Fast Forward

“Sweetie – if you’re going to the shop… we’ve run out of Comfort…”

And so it happens: a simple request, a shopping reminder, becomes emblematic of how busy and somehow soulless modern life has become. I was asking him for fabric softener, of course, just now when he popped out for a newspaper and some scones; at the same time though, it was hard not to make the connection between the brand name and the concept. In a world bound together by the knotted threads of rushing and hurrying and having the right kind of lifestyle to keep up with the neighbours, does the fabric of our lives need smoothing – refreshing – softening?

We got Sky Plus last Christmas. It’s brilliant. No: really. At the touch of a few buttons on the remote, I can record programmes onto a hard drive with what feels like a million times the capacity of a videotape. I don’t even have to remember to do it: if I set a programme once, I can just press the green button and, as if by magic, the device will record the entire series, even taking account of the timing vagaries of schedulers, party political broadcasts, European football matches and all those other things that disrupt the lovely unity of a your favourite show being on at precisely 9pm, every Wednesday night. But that’s not the best thing. My favourite feature of my new televisual toy is the ability to fast-forward – to pause – to rewind. Even if it’s live. You can zip through the adverts and the boring bits, fly back to hear a line you missed again, suspend animation when the phone rings. But… and of course there is a but… the thing is: now I want to do this all the time. When I’m watching, say, Coronation Street for real, live, when it’s scheduled: I want to fast-forward it. My finger is twitching for the little double arrow key. And it doesn’t stop there. A meeting – a sermon – a conversation: as soon as it stops being scintillating, I’m off: I’m in fantasy fast-forward mode. And of course the converse is true as well – I want to press pause on that perfect first springtime sunset, that instant when I make a genuine connection with someone, that rare occasion when someone says something good to me, and means it. I want to rewind it – hear their words again – check they said what I thought – and pause to store the moment away to replay later on.

But real life’s not like that.

Sometimes I wonder though. Take this afternoon. Just before 6, I was driving home when I noticed him. The man in the white taxi. He definitely wanted to press fast forward too. It was a long queue of traffic, and the car in front of me had a disabled passenger warning sticker in its back window. I wanted to keep a safe distance, but the man in the white taxi was having none of it. He was weaving from one side of my car’s back bumper to the other, undoubtedly fantasising about that hallucinatory break in the traffic which might allow him to overtake, even if that should be on the hard shoulder. His jaw was set tight – I could see the tension of his very muscles, so close was his white taxi to my car. When we turned off in different directions at a roundabout, he did so in a roaring cloud of exasperation and exhaust fumes. And yet – what was I doing that was so much more reasonable? I wasn’t breaking the speed limit or the “two second rule”, but I was multi-tasking, catching up on a bluetooth phonecall to free up a little time later on. Time to write this, perhaps, while listening to music, or to do the ironing while watching tv, or to … well, to do some of those essential free-time tasks, at least two at the time. Because though a landline may be cheaper, it can’t be hands-free. Make a call from home when you’re trying to do something else and you’ll soon discover: you can walk around with your portable handset, but as soon as you do that shoulder-clench-support thing, one of two eventualities will ensue: you’ll drop the phone amid much cursing and confusion, or you’ll end up with a really sore neck. It suddenly occurred to me, like the slamming on of brakes in an emergency stop, that I was no different to the man in the white taxi: maybe I wasn’t making anyone feel threatened, but I was certainly living my life in the same kind of fast-forward haste.

And it got me thinking about our multi-tasking world. How often do we really just do one thing at the time? My workout time, in the local gym, doubles as time to listen to music on my iPod. But it doesn’t stop there. In front of me, as I stagger from one instrument of torture to another, is a bank of nine flatscreen televisions: I can plug myself into the sound on the screen of my choice, via a small box attached to the exercise machine I’m using. So while I do battle with the cross trainer like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, I can catch up on the news, or my favourite soap, or, rather incongruously, a cookery programme. Two of the screens pump out music videos along with a loudspeaker rendition of the relevant songs; an even louder-speaker version of the same is available direct to your headphones via the resident technology. The loudspeaker version is often loud enough to drown out whatever you happen to be listening to. One day last week, I noticed that, while I fought with the cross-trainer and thought about trying the rowing machine next, I was simultaneously watching the Breaking News ticker on the Sky News screen, the tennis scores on the Sky Sports Screen, some cookery programme or other somewhere else, and listening to Tori Amos on my iPod in counterpoint with the thudding beat of Cascada from the loudspeaker. The very act of this multiway multi-tasking made me even more tired than the exercise itself. I don’t suppose it burned many calories though, which doesn’t seem terribly fair.

And then there’s that delightful device. The BlackBerry. As if it weren’t enough to be able to receive phonecalls and texts at any time, no matter where you are, you can now be followed around everywhere by “up to ten e-mail addresses” like so many shadowy, almost imperceptible stalkers. At its best, of course, this is extremely useful. Your friends, family, colleagues, whoever, can contact you, and you can contact them, no matter what, or where, or when. At its worst, though… as I sat at a table in a café last Wednesday morning, my eyes drifted past my elevenses companion, who was talking animatedly to his mobile phone, to another couple over in the corner, each of them engaged in separate tête-a-têtes with their handsets, to a group of teenage girls sitting together, texting furiously but barely speaking to one another. When they did speak, it seemed to be simply in incredulous reaction to what they’d read on their screens, and it seemed to be in an acronym-driven extension of their texted thumbprints: OMG! WDC! FFS! LOL!

And – how am I observing all of this? That’s right. In a blog. An instant-access, instant-publish document which makes me feel like the literary equivalent of a ready-meal: pierce the cellophane, press the button, wait a few minutes and… hey presto. Just like the Shopkeeper in Mr Benn, you appear “as if by magic” as a writer. It’s a bit like that new Delia Smith programme on BBC2. How to Cheat at Writing. A pinch of inspiration sprinkled over some pre-prepared snippet of observation – just to make it seem authentic, like the urban myth about the exhausted mum who, under pressure to seem like a domestic goddess at the primary school’s Christmas party, beat the M&S mince pies over the head with a rolling pin to “distress” them enough to make them look homemade. This isn’t just living. This is fast-forward living. Faster and faster, and more and more things at the time, until the to-do lists on the virtual post-its on the screens of our PDA’s grow every bit as dense and as terrifying as the deep, dark forest which grew up around the castle of Sleeping Beauty after the promised fate at her fingertips made her sleep for a hundred years…

And even sleeping, nowadays, isn’t safe. We can do things when we sleep, if we do it right. We can slim to the body, quite literally, of our dreams. We can repair our wrinkled faces if we have that magic potion: the Midnight Secret, the repair potion, the filler-smoother-plumper-upper. We can even condition our hair in our sleep, to cut down styling time next morning: and all “without pillow residue” – surely a phrase which sounds like a contradiction in terms, when set beside the phrase “beauty treatment”?

And so – yes. We’re almost out of Comfort. But the sort of comfort that might make our 24/7 living take a deep breath and finally slow down doesn’t come in a blue bottle or a variety of refreshing fragrances. We can’t just pour a little into a drawer, press a button, and wait an allotted, predictable time for perfect, smooth, fragrant results. It’s not as simple as that in our tailgaiting, fast-forward world.

It’s late. I’ve got to press stop, for now. Not pause. Stop. And I’ve got to find some quietness and anticipate the single task of sleep… and not prepare for it while I watch Newsnight and read a book and talk to the conquering hero who has, by now, returned home with the local papers, a packet of scones and just a little bit of comfort.