Recently a friend of mine has given me a vintage telephone as a gift. You know the sort of thing - one of those brightly-coloured Seventies types, with a comedy receiver and a big dial with finger-holes in it, but fitted with modern innards so it can be plugged straight into a normal phone socket.

And, having used it, I now understand why the homes of some of my childhood friends were equipped with telephone tables. Remember these? They had a sort of pouffe arrangement to sit on, a flat surface for the instrument itself, and a drawer for the Yellow Pages.

I thought these people were dead posh. They must have been, if every other requirement of their lives was already so well furnished that they could afford a dedicated piece just for telephoning. But now I realise that the telephone table evolved simply because dialling was so bloody tiring.

Come around and try it if you don't believe me. You have to insert your finger in the hole corresponding to each individual number, haul it around to the little stop, and then wait for it to return to the start, ready for the next one. It takes ages. In its favour, the size of your phone bill is automatically limited by the amount of damage your index finger can sustain.

And it's got worse. In 1976 my parents' phone number featured eight digits. Now it has 11. Doesn't sound like much of a difference, but two of the new ones are noughts, and the nought is right at the beginning of the dial.

In the time it takes to whirr its way back to first position, I can sense my beard growing. It only takes a few seconds longer to dial with the old phone than it does with the new push-button type, but in this day and age, it feels like a month.

Dialling is not the only thing that has speeded up in my lifetime. Data retrieval is another. If, when I was a student, I needed to look up some facts or figures, I had to get up, have a shower, get dressed, put some shoes on, walk to the library, sign in, look up the book I needed in a card index, find it, find the information I wanted, write it down on a piece of paper, walk all the way back to my house and fall into a coma of exhaustion.

Now I can just look up whatever I need on the internet, of course. And yet, I become incandescent with impatience if the time taken for the page to render on the screen is much more than the twinkling of an eye.

When I mentally tot up all the time saved in a typical life through the good offices of things that are now much quicker - phones, computers, microwaves, dishwashers, cash machines, drive-through restaurants and so on - I end up wondering why we haven't all become concert pianists in the eternity of time we must have. But we haven't, because we've filled it with other things, and all of them are still, in truth, too slow.

Here we arrive at the real problem of the car. It's not pollution or congestion, or even the cost of the thing. The problem is that cars are creakingly pedestrian by the standards of everything else we do. They're barely faster now than they were when I was a child. Meanwhile, even tin openers are geared for higher speeds today than they were in the Seventies. And that's still not fast enough.