EVERYTHING is going digital.

We ken that. But even bus shelters?

Many of you will be familiar with the concept of a bus shelter. It's a place where decent ratepayers wait for the omnibus of their choice to roll up and, with a wheezy sigh, invite them to alight.

"Digital" is more complicated. I looked it up and was whacked on the brain with some bilge about magnetic polarisation and the digits 0 and 1. Let us agree on a more workable definition: right fast electronic stuff, possibly wee in its inner workings.

So how, in the name of the wee man, do you get a digital bus shelter? Well, nurse, it's to do with screens on the shelters, which will supply information relating to transport, tourism, the cooncil and, of course, advertising, that persistent infringement on our lives.

And this news just in: you'll be able to touch the screens to select the information of your choice. In Edinburghshire, nine new hi-tech - love these old-fashioned terms - bus shelters have been installed along Princes Street, in the first phase of the city's digi-doo-dah-development.

And get this: they've been designed by no less an architect than Lord Norman Foster. Modern architects have, like, the straightest rulers ever, and I can see no fripperies of design here.

Nor have I seen the architectural drawings. You know my love of this genre, with its cloudless, azure skies, shiny buildings and calmly purposeful, happy-looking people. Architectural drawings are futuristic, clean and optimistic.

But the illustrations accompanying the blurb for the new stops are accurate, photographic depictions of slovenly, modern citizens in dour jackets and saggy jeans. The Scott Monument pokes pointedly into an inky, early evening sky while one ratepayer, with his back to the viewer, looks like he might be eating chips from a poke. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not the future.

Buses are the past for me anyway. Never go on them now. Wasted too much of my early life existing in nothingness as I waited. And waited and waited. Existential crisis? Waiting for Godot had nothing on waiting for a 16. Your life was in limbo. Your number never came up.

Mind you, they say boredom is the necessary precondition for creativity. My good friend, the veteran columnist Albert Morris, always claimed his favourite stop inspired his muse. Erudite Albert used to describe himself as "a Lothian Region bus passenger of long standing".

Well now, instead of being inspired, bus-waiters can be distracted. Distraction is the central focus of the modern world. Who knows how many essays and novels will be done to death by distraction at these new digital stops?