The pandemic ate my homework. What I mean is that I started writing this some time ago, in what historians will doubtless come to call the ‘Pre-Covid-19 era’. Then the world intervened. Coming back to it, I suppose this isn’t such a bad time (sorry…) to be writing about time.
How do you see time? Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you just feel it, know it’s there without sensing it at all. Perhaps you’ve never thought about it. Perhaps it creeps up behind you in a way you find friendly or frightening. Perhaps you can only just manage to recognise the back of it as it runs off into the distance.
Don’t worry. You haven’t let yourself in for a faux-profound meditation on the meaning of life ‘in these unprecedented times’ (no, I know they are. But I wish all those emails from retailers would stop saying it. I’m not sure it helps). It’s just that I’ve finally realised why the year looks the way it does to me.
My year is a circle. It has been ever since someone (my grandmother, I think) gave me a calendar that looked more like a clock. It was a circle of card, with a plastic arrow in the middle that you could move to point to the time of year. You hung it up by a piece of ribbon, and the edge was painted in a soft, deep green. Christmas came at the top, at the twelve o’clock of the year, and the picture that went with it was a jaunty robin and a little sprig of holly. Appropriate plants and animals marked the other months, but it was the holly that stuck in my mind. I don’t have the calendar any more. Perhaps that’s just as well: it probably wouldn’t be the way I remember it. It would probably be a little shabby, or just little (the way school looks when you go back to it).
I didn’t realise until I was a lot older that my calendar had irrevocably shaped my sense of time, and that my sense didn’t quite match anyone else’s. Christmas was at the top, and August was at the bottom, at six o’clock, and that was the way it was, in saecula saeculorum. Amen. That put my birthday (May) somewhere around four o’clock. By the time the school year started, we’d barely got into the second half of the circle. And I still think that autumn and early winter are the longest part of the year, that spring zips by and summer is just sort of there for a bit, but not a very long bit. And the most confusing thing is that nobody else agrees. I always notice the problem around about now, just after we pass the spring equinox, and when the clocks go back. Why aren’t we at my birthday yet, I wonder (and this is not just the six-year-old within, complaining. At least, I hope not). And how has the bit since Christmas been so long? It isn’t the usual issue about cold days and bad weather. Actually, I rather like both of those. No, it’s the fault of the calendar. And it’s the same in October. I am just beginning to savour the half-circle that will stretch happily to Christmas, with the scent of woodsmoke on the air and the dry leaves whipping along the roads. And then bam. We’re there. Oh!
On top of the circular confusion (if you see what I mean), I have other temporal disagreements with the rest of the world, and these cause me more day-to-day difficulty. For me, the week is a line that stretches straight down. The day is a line that goes straight along. But whatever happens, the movement is, you know, forward. As a result, I am always confused when someone says they’re bringing a meeting ‘forward’. They mean it will be sooner. But to me, sooner, is ‘backward’, i.e. the other way along the line. Cue diary chaos, and conversational misunderstanding.
I’m not sure there’s such a thing as temporal re-education. And even if there were, I’m not sure I’d want it. My circular year has come to be a precious thing to me, filled with memories of things past, and birthdays of friends present, and sweet expectations of the next part of the circle, with its own weather, and smells, and hopes, and books just right for that moment (more on that another time). Time may be a construct, and my time may be constructed in a funny shape, but the thing is, I like it that way.
(courtesy of Wellcome Images)