Why is being late so fashionable?

Haven't you noticed the general timekeeping abilities of London slipping? There seems to be a contagious bout of lateness going around, as if the city's populace have all mislaid their watches.

I noticed it recently while sitting in the bar of a smart London hotel, waiting for a work meeting to begin. Next to me sat a table of boisterous young Arab gentlemen demanding more olives and nuts. A waiter peered at me, bustled up and asked if he could help "madam" as if I was loitering with intent, almost as if I had something of the night about me.

I languished for 15 minutes under the waiter's dubious glare before my phone rang. "I'm on my way," trilled the voice, sans apology, "I'll be there in three minutes." It was another 10 before she arrived.

So it has been with several other meetings in past weeks, and as so often it is with certain friends. For a birthday lunch recently, 12.15pm was the only time I could get a table at the new Gordon Ramsay hotel The York and Albany. I issued instructions on the importance of our punctuality as if I was auditioning for the Waffen-SS. Tables there are booked for weeks. And yet still I sat for 20 minutes, pretending to do important things on my phone (you all do it too) while waiting.

Admittedly, I'm an early person. The kind of girl who will not only arrive early to my own wedding, but beat the groom and quite probably all the guests there too, sighing theatrically at the aisle while everyone else slips in behind me. (How lucky that groom will be, I bet you're thinking.) But better to be early than late, surely? Promptness is next to godliness, as the ancient proverb never said.

Entire blogs are devoted to this thorny question of timekeeping. I know because I've looked them up, probably while bored and waiting for someone. Late Tubes, trains and slow buses are naturally much blamed.

One entry pledges that punctuality depends on whether you were born early or late, a theory that warrants short scientific shrift. It was probably written by someone who numbers themselves among the "chronically late" or "punctually challenged", phrases used by society's latecomers to excuse themselves as if they suffer from a debilitating disease.

The new assumption seems to be that you can agree a meeting time but show up a good deal later. "7.30-ish" or "around 8 o'clock" is standard. The pretext, when the culprits show, is that they're "fashionably late", not rude. So let's not tell them the clocks have gone back, perhaps they'll be on time.