About ten years ago, I realised I had largely forgotten how to write longhand. After decades of Amstrads, PCs, laptops, smartphones, writing more than a few sentences by hand had become genuinely difficult: the muscles had lost the memory, and my signature had decayed into an embarrassed squiggle. A few years later I was obliged to write out an entire cheque, and I found the task so strange and taxing I might as well have been asked to illuminate a medieval manuscript. 

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Now I suspect the same thing is happening to me with reading, especially the reading of books. This is an awkward confession from a man who has spent his whole adult life writing books. It is like a distiller announcing he has gone teetotal, or worse, that he has forgotten why anyone would drink whisky in the first place. 

Partly, and obviously, it’s the smartphone, the ultimate distraction machine. I’ll read three paper pages of something worthwhile and then a small voice says: ‘Sod it, how’s that lab leak argument on X coming along? Should I buy that Tang Dynasty rice bowl on eBay?’ And is it really true that robots can now run faster than Usain Bolt? (It is.) 

And thus, in an instant, I’m gone, scrolling through wild infinity, lost down three dozen rabbit-holes. When I surface, fifty minutes later, I’ve lost the thread of the book, along with the mood and the will. These days, reading anything serious means leaving the phone in........

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