FraserWords

WE are going to have to address the question of time, seeing as I’m late yet again. This was supposed to be a blog to read with your morning coffee, for the Crab’s sake. It has become something to read with your evening cocoa.

But time just doesn’t work, does it? Brother Mellors and I have taken our enormous tools to deal with some shrubbery today; having assessed the job it looked like five hours work. Or so. Eight hours later…

And it’s not as if Brother Mellors dawdles when he gets his chopper out, I can tell you. No, it was constant labour, putting a sheltered housing estate’s lawns and borders in order…

And I have evidence to back this up: the other day, it took Brother Bertie and I about 15 minutes to empty 5 tons of hardcore rubble out of a flatbed trailer by shovel and elbow grease… yet Bertie claims he did it in ten minutes with the next trailer load on his own… Clearly time is elastic, or Brother Bertie is bluffing.

Either way, any way, it must be Time that’s at fault. Not us.

People have always told me that time goes faster when you get older, and this seems to be the case. I find that working for a newspaper that publishes weekly accelerates things incredibly: with a deadline to aim at everything seems to compress itself into a wrong-end-of-the-telescope scenario.

Conversely, pleasurable things – steady, Brother Fiddle – pleasurable things don’t last more than a micro-second, do they? I don’t mean that: clearly that would still occupy many hours of near unbearable delight in real time, but those hours would feel like seconds, wouldn’t they?

No, I was being more prosaic. At some point in each evening, after slaving like a whipped cur since daybreak, I will heave a sigh of relief, crack open a little drink, and sit down to read or watch television or listen to music. One nanosecond later – or that’s what it feels like – the eyelids will droop, a thin slick of dribble will start its inexorable journey from the side of my mouth to my shirt and the dogs will steal whatever snack it is I’ve armed myself with from my slumbering hands. Bastards.

What, then, can one do about Time?

Well, there’s a simple lesson: if you wish to feel you have more time, spend your days doing thing you dislike. Life will last for ever.

Or… fill your days with nothing but pleasure so that time knows no way of slowing you down. Your additional bonus with this option is that if you really like pleasure, you’re likely to die suddenly and thus avert all the time-consuming business of growing older.

There are people who manage to take on Time and give it a bloody good kicking, of course.

One example would be the very, very great King of the Blues, Chairman of the Board of Blues Singers, His Majesty the BB King, who died this week at the age of 89. He played nearly to the end, never wavered in his passions, his beliefs, his strivings and was one of the great cultural giants of the 20^th century. I had the great good fortune to see him play live, and it is a memory I will always treasure.

But me? Well, you have a blog. It has taken minutes to construct, badly, and those minutes have flown by, interrupted only by that particularly excruciating sense of disappointment you get when you open a bottle of red wine expecting it to be good and it tastes like hope tasted last Friday morning – bitter.

So I shall now experiment with the effect upon time of a very large cheap gin and a small amount of tonic. It may well bring sleep quite quickly, but who knows? It may, too, bring dreams, sweet dreams.

And Finally

Can I recommend those of you who love fine words in general and poetry in particular to visit www.theheliostat.com: here live some truly remarkable poems by our Sister, Gina O’Dowd Channing, work to make you think and… beguile your time. ‘I take a thing I do not own when you edge close: the millimetre thief…’ Beautiful writing.