I feel like I’ve had an enormously busy couple of weeks, but I hate myself for thinking so. I mean, everyone’s busy. ‘Busy’ is the modern disease.

When someone rings me up and asks me how I am, without fail I’ll say, ‘All right, busy.’ But what am I actually trying to communicate?
Sometimes, I figure I’m just setting parameters for our conversation – ‘I can only speak to you for five minutes on account of my hectic schedule.’ I don’t feel too badly about this. After all, everybody I know does exactly the same to me.

The other day, Juliet, my editor at Penguin, rang me up. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked. ‘You know,’ I said. ‘Busy.’ And I was. I was busy watching the cricket.

'Busy' is the most acceptable social defence mechanism. It says, ‘My life is full of vital things that demand my attention and are more important to me than talking to you … but don’t take it personally.’  I wonder if this is a reaction to our increasing accessibility. I seem to have developed a paranoid desire to be accessible at all times, for fear of ‘missing out’; even though I clearly don’t like the consequences. Pretty much anyone in the world can reach me any time of day or night through one of landline, mobile, text, e-mail, website, Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. I mean …

Secretly, I imagine this will allow a Hollywood exec to tweet me a six figure option on my first novel in 140 characters or less. In fact, it allows a poet I met once in Berlin to tell me he just bought a kettle.  ‘Mine’s a Rusell Hobbs,’ I tweet back – to him and the world.

A couple of months ago, I emerged from the gym to find two messages and an e-mail on my Crackberry from someone at The Observer. The first message was asking me if I wanted to write something or other. The e-mail, timed a couple of minutes later, said much the same. The second message said that, since I hadn’t got back to him, he’d assumed I was busy and had therefore commissioned someone else. I’d been in the gym an hour.

If you ask someone why they’re so busy, generally they reply, ‘Oh, you know, life.’ What does that mean? Does boiling an egg constitute busy? What about hanging out with your husband or wife? What about watching cricket? And, if they don’t blame life, they blame work. Then, I think ‘but I called you at work’. I mean, how can you complain about working at work? That’s like jumping into a swimming pool and complaining about the need to swim.

Some of ‘Jerusalem’ is set in a Cotswold village at the beginning of the twentieth century. I read a bunch of social history. Turns out it wasn’t all ‘Cider With Rosie’ – as far as I remember, mostly apple blossom and erotic flushing. Instead, those villagers were busy – up with the lark, feeding and ploughing and milking and fencing and planting and so on. But I wonder if they felt it. ‘Oy Jack, you fenced top field?’ / ‘No, George, I be right busy.’ / ‘What you doing?’ / ‘Updating my status on Facebook.’

Unfortunately, I fear my own busy status is now hard-coded. So, the best I can hope for is to streamline my process. Next time a friend calls and asks how I am, therefore, I’ll be especially terse: ‘Busy. Are you busy?’/ ‘Yeah. Life. You know.’ / ‘Right. Shall we do this again tomorrow?’ And, with that, I’ll put down the phone and I’ll return to the important details of my everyday existence that can’t be postponed another moment.