tick...tick...tick...

Time is, as you may surmise from the title of this post, ticking away. It does that a lot just lately and a conversation in the pub garden last week, as we sat supping in the warm afternoon, made me realise just why it seems to tick by faster for some than others.
It's all down to the markers we use to measure the passage of time. I don't mean the seconds, minutes and hours. They are just the units. I mean the semesters, the annual contracts, the birthdays. They are the things we notice.
There goes another 3,153,600 seconds means nothing much to anybody. It's another year gone since my last Summer contract at Harrow School is far more telling. And one marker makes me think of  the others. I did my first Summer School in 2001. Good grief! That's a lot of time passed by.
As a teacher my time is marked as start of year, half term, Christmas, half term, Easter, half term, end of year, start of Summer contract, end of Summer contract and on and on in an endless march. The days, weeks and months don't actually matter. When I was travelling, I had no regular events to mark the passing time and it didn't feel as if it was passing quickly. Of course once it was over it felt as if it had passed quickly, but that's a different thing entirely.

It all makes me feel old. Not as old as that concert last night did of course, twenty eight years since that band played together, thirty since I last saw them. One of my friends brought his daughter with him. The band split up six years before she was born.

So another year has passed, has it?
Two more days and I'll be back on that Summer contract. I'll be slogging up and down the hills of Harrow, teaching English to teenagers and trying to fill the rest of the time with some kind of activity. The Hill isn't exactly brimming over with entertainment possibilities and this year that ticking clock has been taking its toll. I have developed gout and that has quite a number of implications. For a start it will make that slogging up and down the hills a lot more painful. Worse than that though is that my doctor has made three recommendations, none of which will make the filling of the hours any easier. I can, and have, cut down on the amount of meat I eat. Most of the vegetarian options (and most of the non-vegetarian ones, now I think of it) at Harrow involve mushrooms and I'm allergic to them. There's always the salad bar.
I also have to lose weight. That's a bit harder to do when people give you three very large meals a day. I know I don't HAVE to eat them but willpower is harder when it's all, quite literally, handed to you on a plate. Worst though is the cutting down on alcohol. When I said that the Hill isn't brimming with entertainment possibilities I was praising with faint damnation. What there is, is one pub. My habit of popping down for a quick beer on most evenings, just to pass the time and see who is about, will have to be curtailed. I suppose as I do only have one there would be no harm in having one fruit juice instead - just as well as it takes a stronger stomach than mine to drink orange juice in any quantity.

We shall see. Since I started this post another thirty minutes or so has ticked away. I'll be in Harrow before I know it. And then, just as quickly it will all be over and I'll be back at the start of the new year for my regular job.

tick... tick... tick...

Recycling again

I accidentally clicked on the link to my original blog - the one with a bare handful of posts scattered over a couple of years. I read them again. One of them was about how I hadn't posted much. Well, about "time" really, and about perceptions of time. I thought I'd update and rehash it here (and correct some of the more egregious typos.)

I had originally intended it to be a weekly blog of about a thousand words. A thousand words ? Once a week ? About travel ?
Piece of cake. After all I'd done it before - I used to write a newspaper column with exactly that brief. It didn't prove to be as easy as I'd thought it would to get down to it though. Time was the problem, and sometimes nowadays it still is - though my post count on this blog is phenomenal by comparison. There's always something else that has to be done, something with a more urgent command of my time. Back then there was work. I had started a new career ,teaching, a year earlier and I'd never been as happy in a job, but it took my time. Right now there is also work. I'm a lot more experienced now and orders of magnitude faster at finding resources and planning lessons but it still takes time - and this week is Ofsted so recently it's taken even more time. Then there's my other writing. I may be an infrequent attendee at my writers' group now, but I do post on various boards and spend an inordinate amount of time penning poems and travel items, mostly for my own amusement. Then there's my social life. It may not be MUCH of a social life but I really wouldn't like the life of a starving recluse penning his magnum opus in a lonely garret.
Yes time is the problem.
What, I hope you are asking, does all this have to do with travel. Quite a lot actually because if ever there is a circumstance where time becomes a real problem it's on a one week holiday in an interesting place. Now I know that for some people a holiday is a week lying on a beach or getting hammered in a bar but that isn't me. I like to be doing things.
Take the trip I made to Catalonia. I started that trip in Barcelona. I arrived at my hotel at lunch time on Saturday and took the three O'clock train out on Monday. In between I even managed a trip out to Montserrat.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and with its benefit maybe I'd have been better not doing that trip. There was such a long list of things I wanted to do in Barcelona, and in fact I managed to achieve almost none of it. Second on the list was to spend time looking at the Gaudi architecture for which the city is famous. Well I did spend half a morning at Segrada Familia but as for the rest, many of which are even more interesting, I took pictures whenever I walked past but took no time to explore. Number one on my list, I confess, was too important to treat so superficially - the Museo Picasso. It was one of the main reasons for my visit to the city so having whizzed round the cathedral in an hour and a half I spent the rest of the day at this fine gallery. Even so, I was a little rushed as there was the unexpected bonus of an additional exhibition of Picasso caricatures.
That was it for Barcelona though - from a list of a dozen things to see and do, two crossed off. One and a half really.
You see the problem. Time.

On the long trips time takes on a stranger role - though sometimes as tyrannical. When you are stuck somewhere - seven weeks in Ecuador for example - then time ceases to be meaningful in any real sense. You can potter and amble where otherwise you might sprint and stride. You can sit for a day at a sidewalk cafe fending off the postcard vendors and drinking beer. You can lose yourself in Quito's labyrinthine and exhausting old town streets.
Then suddenly you have to move on. There's a fixed time for your bus to be leaving and you have allowed yourself to become settled in the hostel, allowed your rucksack to become unpacked.
Aware of your neglect time gets its own back by making your last sight of the city you are leaving a jumbled profusion of rushing and dashing and panic.
There is a duality to the way time behaves when your plans involve fifteen countries and nine months stretching out around you. In the big picture it seems unimportant. After all what does it matter if you cross into another country tomorrow or in two days time.
If you are stuck for an extra week in Rawalpindi while the officials at the Chinese embassy throw every possible obstacle in the way of the visas you will need next month then so be it. Have a weekend in the mountains, get out of the city and relax.
If you are temporarily stranded in Quito awaiting the arrival of others from your group then catch the bus out to Otovalo, spend a day visiting the cattle market or the huge open market that fills the city streets. Never mind that you have no use for a cow, however cheap, or a bolt of brightly coloured silk that an ox couldn't carry. It doesn't matter because at that level time doesn't matter.
Just keep in the back of your mind though a small clock ticking so that time doesn't jump out from some dark corner one morning and surprise you with a bus or train timetable that says you are leaving in an hour - better get your skates on with the packing.

And now time is against me again. I need to get back to doing some work for the inspection - though I've done most of it already - and ensure that I don't do too miserably if I get observed.

It was my habit in that old blog to finish every entry with a poem. This one was finished with one I wrote when I was about twenty. It wasn’t very good, but, for what it’s worth, here it is again. It’s about time - specifically about Wednesday.

Wednesday

Wednesday was a slow day
even by my standards
of self-indulgent indolence.
The painting-by-numbers
regimented routine,
the dull and empty silence
did not vary.
No worrying tremors shook
the waiting seismograph
of my inattention.
No dark, pock-marked sunspots
disturbed my shining face
with apprehension
or made me wary.

I spent the whole morning
solving the crossword clues
folded flat on my desk.
C , four blanks, ION,
"the unkindest cut of all".
A simple clue or simple truth -
Though I’d say both.
In the afternoon I stared
with gaping goldfish mouth
and alligator eyes
at the girl in the black sweater
whose captive bosom bounced
and with every breath and sigh
disturbed my sloth.

Seven years

Apparently, though I hadn't realised it until someone mentioned it, wordcraft - a message board I mention often enough here - has been running for seven years now. I wasn't in right at the start but pretty soon afterwards.

So, seven years, eh?
Congratulations are certainly in order.
It illustrates nicely a distinction in the way that we perceive time that I first encountered in a televised lecture by Jonathan Miller, many years ago. We perceive two different kinds of time: "time passing" and "time passed".
"Time passing" proceeds at a slow, leisurely pace. Over the seven years of wordcraft our debates have often ebbed and flowed through weeks or even months of steady measured discussion. Starting from the nominal topic posted they have veered off on new courses, following all kinds of relevant and irrelevant currents. There has been no special urgency, even in our games where the deadlines are frequently extended until enough people take part.
But "time passed" is another matter. Suddenly someone says, "Hey, did you know it's been seven years since we started?" and straight away that seven years shrinks to seven seconds. Seven years have gone in a moment solely because our attention has been drawn to them. Seven years ago I was a different me and although I can enumerate the things I've done and seen in that time I have no emotional grasp of the period. It's gone. Lost in a single lightning-bolt moment of saying "Hey, did you know it's been seven years?"

No matter how slow the time was in passing, it was too quick when viewed from here, too quick once passed. The fact is driven home by the loss of some of our members, most recently Jerry. It's a gloomy thought but we are all seven years older, seven years slower and seven years closer to death. But when all is said and done perhaps the time passing is more important than the time passed. Having known Jerry and missann and Morgan is, after all, more important than having lost them.

Seven years from now someone will say, "Hey, did you know it's fourteen years since wordcraft started?" and, assuming I'm still here, I'll suddenly feel seven years older again, but in the meantime there will have been seven more years of time passing.

A curious sense of time not passing

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to have another blog that died from lack of attention. One of the entries that I put on it was about a Mensa* party that I went to that turned out to be uncannily similar to the same party the year before. I titled the entry “A curious sense of time not passing”.
The sharper-eyed among you will notice that this entry shares the title. In fact it applies even more aptly to how I spend my summers than it did to the party.
When I first passed my CELTA – literally on the day the course ended – I was immediately offered a summer school post at Harrow. The result was that I found myself, only one day later, standing up for the first time to teach in earnest and facing a class of mixed nationality teenagers who were expecting to have a professional teacher in front of them. After all, it’s what their parents had paid for. Somehow I muddled through and I must have done a decent job because I was asked if I’d like to come back the following year.
I’m in my eighth year here now and each time I return I’m seized by that same sense of time not passing. I see many of the same faces in the staff room, similar (and in some cases identical) faces in the classroom, the same faces in administration, on the activities staff, in the dining room and around and about on the hill.
By and large I get the same level classes and teach similar lessons in similar ways. I make the same conversation with the same people and go at the same times to the same pubs. This year I even have the same room with the same curtains, the same square of torn poster too high on the wall to remove and the same inexplicable red marks on the ceiling.
Time not passing, indeed.

Right now on the radio there is the mournful and melancholic Lord of the Rings theme that so perfectly evokes the towering grandeur of the mountains, the immense open sky, the bone-deep ancient knowledge that the world is vast and that you are too tiny to even be noticed.
But I am in a room in Harrow, a student’s room with a bed, a chair, a wardrobe, a desk and a shelf and the world doesn’t feel vast. It feels tiny – collapsed to this single point in time and space; into this sense of time not passing.

Strangely though it is accompanied by a simultaneous sense that time has passed. That great sections of my future have raced past me with the irresistible force and destructive effect of an avalanche. I had passed forty when I first came here. I’d already had one life as a computer programmer and systems analyst. Now I’ve passed fifty – but that isn’t time passing, it’s time passed; time gone; time vanished. And I find myself at a loss to work out what happened to it all because though eight years have clearly come and gone there is still only that sense, that curious sense, of time not passing.

*I'm not actually a member of Mensa, I was there as a guest of a friend who is.