A hundred and fifty years ago, this was just a continent. You could move to the borders and start a whole new country.

Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last - that once-crushing 'weight' has become, for the most part, a memory.

I don't remember what I did fifty years ago.

And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died.

And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years.

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.