WHILE erecting a picket fence the other day - a proper job, complete with troublesome metal anchors - I spent some of the time chewing the cud with a neighbour who happened to be walking his dog.

We sorted out the world's troubles and even crept up on such contentious topics as women in the workplace, but my main reason for welcoming his presence was its interruption.

When we over-50s and retired folk make a show of being fit and active, sometimes looking a tad ridiculous while doing so, we conceal the joys of not having to rush things.

To some, respite is one of the problems of retirement.

Having spent their lives meeting deadlines at work, they feel guilty when a task becomes open-ended and there is no-one but themselves to set a target.

However, in the life of the super-annuated, the days roll out in slow motion, creating time for planning, reflection and philosophical discourse over the wall.

Anything which confounds this deceleration, such as haste and speed in all their manifestations, gets us worked up, especially road vehicles travelling at more than 50mph.

I'm about to ask the firm which makes 'Baby on Board' signs for the rear windows of cars to print a custom-made job for me bearing the legend 'Oldie at the Wheel', so that I can cruise leisurely up the A449 without some Jeremy Clarkson lookalike in a Porsche trying to park in my boot.

The last time this happened, and the tousle-haired homunculus at the wheel raced past having made his point, I wound down the window and screamed, 'Drug dealer!' in the insupportable hope that he might opt for a less thrusting model and start to behave like an MoT driving examiner.

My own contribution to the 9/11 debate is to wonder why we are outraged by a spectacular terrorist attack that kills 3,000 people without for a moment speculating on what we might have done to deserve it, yet in the knowledge that excessive speed is the cause ignore the fact that more people than this are killed on Britain's roads every year.

Spare time can make you sour, and I wouldn't want to be like any of the prickly fishwives on TV's Grumpy Old Men, the programme that pairs Clarkson with the insufferable and underwhelming A A Gill and makes what the complainers defend itself worthy of stricture. At the same time, the assumption of a gentler pace requires advocacy.

The poor Americans, who had to endure the image of people jumping from the Twin Towers while the 'infidel' justified his carnage, appear to be paragons of good sense in matters of car speed.

While driving through Vermont and Massachusetts a few years ago, my mind stacked to the rafters with stills from Hollywood B movies, I regularly had the feeling of being tailed by G men, such was the reluctance of drivers to travel faster than 50mph or overtake, even on open roads.

But sedate motion in New England has its origins in the conservation of petrol rather than in the avoidance of accidents, which makes America's atrocity-driven sufferings and civilised road sense appear to spiral from the same cauldron, emblazoned on its side with the word POLITICS, like a pot of trouble in a Rowlandson cartoon.

This is just the sort of thing to argue about over the garden wall while a domestic job waits to get done.

The longer the unprimed trellis fence lies flat on the lawn awaiting union with its uprights, the greater will be the chance of a resolution.

So I'm timing the next task to coincide with my neighbour's appearance around the corner.

The dog's none too keen to be rushing about either.

Sane chap!