Is it just ME?

Or do dawdlers drive you mad?

YOU know who I mean. They are people moving slowly, often handin-hand, pausing to windowshop or share a playful kiss. Behind them, you scuttle, fretting and trying to weave a path round their dreamy, elephantine contentment.

The galling fact is that these human snails are so perfectly happy, shambling along, probably living ‘mindfully’ in the moment.

But we need to get to work. Or to the station. Or to get the shopping home. We want to stride purposefully. But the wandering crowds make it like wading through mud.

It is, of course, a special curse of the tourist season because people on holiday always slow down, just as they suffer the illusion that it is OK to walk in the middle of a road because, hey, it’s a picturesque Cornish road!

London creaks under the weight of entranced visitors: appalled Germans at the Crossrail construction chaos, vast French school parties emerging into the Piccadilly rush hour and standing rooted on the stairs in a bunch of solid wonderment.

I’m reminded of the Donna Leon novel about the Venetian detective Brunetti, in which the harassed cop snarls: ‘Why couldn’t they, for God’s sake, learn to walk properly in a city and not moon about like people at a country fair asked to judge the fattest pig?’

But it isn’t just tourists. They at least have an excuse to go slowly and take in the view. Far worse is the yearround epidemic of people who dawdle along.

There are times you have to be slow — with a small child, or a disability — but if you know you are nowhere near the average speed of the crowd, be generous, stay near the wall, keep single file.

Oh, and don’t clutch amorously at your partner. None of us needs to be envious as well as delayed.

‘Happy human snails, shambling along, probably living “mindfully” in the moment’