Five Minutes
The week can just run away with you. Perhaps it’s a symptom of age, maybe a simple matter of perception versus to-do list versus the increasingly urgent need to bank more than eight hours sleep a night. You can only fit so much into a sixteen-hour day. This week, unfortunately, has not provided opportunity for the glean and winnow of the internet which ends up with the half-baked confection that is your soar-away Saturday Swipe.
To put it another way—no linky madness this week, chums. Instead, let me open up and talk in a freeform way about time, roughly ordered into five short segments.
Boy, I know how to sell it, don’t I?
The Day Job continues to exasperate, confound and irritate in equal measure, but it has its shining moments. Take this Wednesday, when we hosted a session where an honest-to-goodness national treasure was in attendance. A veteran news broadcaster, he submitted with grace and good humour to a few hours reviewing film and video footage of reportage from atrocities of the past. Uganda, El Salvador, Iran. He was there, on the ground, with corpses as backdrop, making sure the folks back home knew what was happening to people who were very much like them and, if it were not for the lottery of geography, could have been their neighbours.
It was an eerie experience, to be frank. His commentary, delivered in familiar velvet tones, expressed regret for not doing more to highlight the horrors of the arenas in which he worked. I couldn’t think what more he could have done.
Chatting at the end of the session, I mentioned how important I felt his work had been and how formative to my worldview. I was doing the maths in my head—his reports would have gone out on British TV 44 years ago, and I would have watched them as a teenager. The worst thing about all of that, of course, is that nothing has meaningfully changed except the location of the horror.
Which gets me thinking even more seriously about the inexorable flow that the river of time takes towards the wine-dark sea. 2024 was a banner year for TLC and I, spanning thirty years of marriage and twenty in Reading. To mix the metaphors further, a milestone and a hurdle leapt, but the race continues. I have saucepans older than some of my work colleagues. And yet it feels sometimes that I’ve stayed put while everything else has galloped past. Looking in the mirror, the guy who stares back at me is an amalgamation of all those years, all that change—and yet behind the eyes he’s still a weird, nerdy eighteen-year-old, blinking in the early daylight, wondering what’s coming.
Martin Belam wrote a bit about this last week, particularly applying to music, nostalgia and the cycles of trend. In associated news, we’ll be going to see The Waterboys next month. I suspect it won’t be a young crowd and, although Mike Scott and the ‘Boys will be touring a new album, everyone there will be waiting for the songs they remember from forty years ago.
A daytime trip out last weekend for some comedy. Chris McCausland, to be a little more precise—Strictly champion, advocate for the blind community. He did three shows in Reading on Saturday at 1, 4 and 8, which quite some going. He was sharp as a tack and brutally funny at the late afternoon show. I suspect the last one of the night may have been a little looser, a bit more sweary.
He noticed, with typical acuity, that the crowd (a sell-out, not bad for a weekend afternoon in April) had ‘an old laugh’. He was dead on—most of the folks in the Hexagon that afternoon would have broached their half century or were coming up on it. Not a surprise, of course—us oldies would find a show where we could be entertained, go out for a meal afterwards and still be home for bed at 9 to be a very attractive proposition. I’ve embraced the whole ‘early-rise, early-bed’ lifestyle and it suits me very well. I was never that sociable anyway. Maybe I’ve grown into my truest self, the person I was all along. Only now do I have the belligerence and honesty to fit into that skin.
I ran a pretty successful session at Reading Writers this week. The theme was prompt writing—putting together a piece based on an object, image or phrase—but I made it clear from the start the real point of the night was just to give everyone time to write. It’s a solitary discipline, one to which it’s difficult to give the solid, daily routine it really needs. If you have a life, a family, a job, it’s all too easy to find the excuses not to pick up a pen or unfold a laptop.
Structured around three fifteen minute sprints with a short break between each (a sort of lackadaisical Pomodoro technique) with a table full of objects to spark the imagination, this simple gift of time worked brilliantly. Everyone took something away from the evening—a bit of character work, some settings or even the structure and plot for a whole short story. We’ll be doing more sessions like this. Who knew that a writing group could actually enjoy writing if they got the chance?
Thinking about the perception of time—or rather, how we choose to perceive it. The prompt writing night seemed to fly by yet, if we had spent the same evening at home with our families, cooking dinner, helping with homework, maybe just watching a bit of telly, it may have passed far more slowly. The tick of a second hand can seem to pause if we look straight at it, our brains filling the gap between moments in an unevenly distributed way.
This can start to scramble your head if you let it. Who decided that a second was a second, anyway? Why do we portion the day in the way we do? Different cultures have different calendars, or they will be adjusted over centuries as new regimes decide there is a more logical method—just look at the French Revolution, whose architects declared each month to have thirty days, each week to be a ten-day cycle. Don’t forget, we’re still subject to the whims of government-mandated time travel twice yearly. The clocks may go forward or back, but the river of time flows in the same inorexable fashion.
I look at the guy in the mirror and think ‘how old are you really?’ The aches, pains, belly flab and jowls tell one story. The eyes tell another. I’m subject to biological changes which I could, if I had the money and the nerve, largely reverse. But it would be a lie. However I choose to ride the river, it carries me on regardless. Here in Caversham, I choose to spend this particular sliver of time at a table, writing away, sharing the contents of my head with you. Nothing makes me happier than knowing you choose to spend another segment reading it.
View this post on InstagramOne last thought from Ralph Waldo Emerson.A post shared by Letters of Note (@lettersofnote)
For The Outro, I couldn’t think of a better tune than this, from Annie and Dave’s foray into power pop. The drums, front and centre in the mix as they should be, are courtesy of Clem Burke, whose boat slid into the wine-dark sea this week. The engine of Blondie, he was one of the few sticksmen who could lay down the thunder while dressed in a full Elvis-style gold lamé suit. Did I say sticksman? I meant showman.
(I only realised after posting that the director of this clip is playing his own games with time—stopping and starting the action, spinning Annie backwards from the floor in a pirouette. Another one of those examples of once you find a theme, the story starts to write itself.)
See you next Saturday, time travellers.
