I’M not dewy-eyed about the past. I know that modern technology has made our lives longer, safer and in many ways more pleasant.

But progress has a price tag in the shape of the accelerated – at times frenetic – pace at which we all seem fated to live our lives these days. The chief culprits are three pieces of kit that we now deem indispensable, but without which we managed happily enough for centuries.

The first, of course, is the car. Leave aside its baleful influence on the environment and atmosphere and think instead about the anger, aggression and plain bad manners that it fuels.

Let’s take a look at how people drive every day – and while we’re at it look at our own behaviour behind the wheel too. I imagine that most of us drive quicker and in a less considerate manner than we did a year or ten years ago, because we’ve got to get there first, haven’t we? I wouldn’t call this road rage. It’s more of a kind of permanent short temper that sours so many of our journeys for us, our passengers and fellow road users. Yes, we all see acts of courtesy and consideration on the road, but they are badly outnumbered by the selfish and the plain dangerous.

The second is the mobile phone. Our ancestors had the sound of birdsong to soothe them.

We get Crazy Frog.

Again, it’s hard to imagine what we did before mobile phones – as an aside isn’t it amazing how they’ve changed from something the size of a house brick into fashion accessories that fits in your palm? What we did, of course, was wait. We exercised patience until we got home to phone whoever we wanted to speak to – or better still popped round to see them.

We thought about what we wanted to say and said it in an appropriate place. We did not conduct private conversations in public at full volume.

And in third place we have the computer, that amazing invention that gives us instant access to new worlds of knowledge, or, at least, endless games of solitaire. There’s an old saying that television killed the art of conversation.

Maybe it did, but it was email that destroyed the skill of communication.

Cold, impersonal and seemingly anonymous, email was created for the kind of sterile world many of us seem happy to inhabit – just me and my computer screen against the world.

With an email you can be rude at long range.

Think about the contrast with writing a letter about something that’s annoyed you. Before you put pen to paper, you have to find your tools, sit down and think about what you are doing. You reflect and more often than not reason prevails. With email, you crash out your text, tap the ‘send’ button and the job’s done. Emails are a form of communication that makes us forget that our words – as well as our actions – have consequences.

What these three things have in common is, of course, speed. They provide the instant hit, the immediate gratification for the “me-now” society.

So let me make a suggestion: if you’re behind the wheel, at your screen or merely infuriating your fellow citizen with a moronic ring tone, try this over the Christmas holiday.

Leave it in the garage. Turn it off. Unplug it. Ease up a bit and think about what you’re doing to other people – and yourself. Who knows, you might even enjoy life in the slow lane.

And then we might all have a pleasant – and peaceful – Christmas.