It is a paradox that we, who have never had it so good, should feel so harried. Whereas our greatgrandparents worked 14-hour shifts on steam-filled factory floors just to keep themselves in gruel, we clock off when we fancy and still afford the finest foods on our well-stocked supermarket shelves. We don't know what it is to sweat over the washboard and mangle: our many and various machines wash, launder and dry while we put our feet up for a leisurely evening planning our next trip to Thailand. And to top it all, we can expect 80 years of this easeful existence, nearly twice as many as only a century ago. We should be swimming in an abundance of time.

But instead we are drowning. Despite our alleged lives of leisure, we are still slaves to the clock and the calendar. Seventy per cent of organisations in the UK report that work-place stress is rife - an astonishing 88 per cent of these are in the public sector. One recent study estimated that 10m working days a year were lost to stress-related health problems at a cost to the UK's gross national product of £26bn.