Time is a funny old thing and I say that as someone who has placed great store in the concept of time, I still remember my first watch with great fondness, a navy digital thing with a spaceman on it. Indeed I am always at a bit of a loss if I don’t have a watch on me, even in these days where the mobile phone is a constant reminder of time, I like to be grounded by a watch on my left wrist. Although I must say that in the past couple of years this faith in time has been shaken first of all by my change in working circumstances, do weekends still hold the same magnificence when you don’t work Monday to Friday? Secondly this unease has been exacerbated by the emergence of Covid 19 with everybody including my wife, working from home, summer holidays being cancelled or foreshortened and of course lockdowns that are forever extended with restrictions heightened. What use is time when it can’t even tell me if the football season will start or end anymore?

I used to like the whole package around Time and I mean not just Time defined as the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole, although I am big believer in that also. But Time as the measure of when and indeed where we are at any point in the day, month or year. I like the way Time grounds us within our universe, how a birthday represents another trip around the sun.

Needless to say, this reverence for Time means that I am generally regarded as a prompt person. I can definitely say that I inherited this characteristic from my father and not my mother. I know this because my childhood is littered with occasions of waiting with my dad! Normally this waiting would occur at a shopping centre. The Ilac centre springs to mind, endlessly waiting by the indoor pond with the fountains that sprayed water like see-through toadstools. Staring at the nearby ice-cream counter with all those exotics flavours while the scent of cheap donuts filled the air. Watching the world go by and waiting for my sister and mother to return from Arnotts, Roches Stores, M&S or some other equally diabolical place.

This desire for promptness has caused some friction in my relationships over the years but has also given me plenty of scope for what the modern wellness gurus would call self-analysis, in other words wishing I hadn’t forgotten my walkman / discman / ipod / mobile phone so now I have to think about the state of my life while waiting for my girlfriend / friend(s) / wife to arrive! Obviously I try to not to meet my girlfriend and wife at the same place!!

So back to the current situation and 6 weeks of Level 5 lockdown which coincidentally has aligned itself with the moment when we put our clocks back by an hour. Usually I would be delighted for the extra hour sleep but not this year. Yay, even darker evenings when our kids can’t go outside and play with their friends. Days merge into days and the only way of telling where we are in the week is from the memes on the internet, you know the ones where Tina Fey goes “what a week, huh?” and Alec Baldwin replies “it’s Tuesday”, this informs me that it is Tuesday!

The kids seem remarkably resilient around this discombobulation. I mean Oscar (7) never seemed to know what day of the week it was anyway. Five out of seven days he’d be disappointed to find out it wasn’t the weekend, tough odds! But this week they took to writing Santa letters in October without a complaint. In fact they seemed to attack it with relish, perhaps this is because Oscar now believes that Christmas has been brought forward this year! There was a further element of confusion in that the boys managed to unearth last years Smyths’ catalogue and had already prepared a draft of their letters before I spotted this year’s version lying at the bottom of a shelf in their bedroom. This was followed by an in-depth discussion around why Santa would require us to use this year’s catalogue, but I think we got away with it on the grounds that Santa is insistent that he only produces the latest models otherwise the elves might get confused around specifications!

So now we head into the mid-term break and I can’t believe that we’re already halfway between the start of the school year and Christmas. I also struggle to believe that this will be the only break we’ll have before the end of December. In my gut I felt that we should have kept going with school as now we are out we may never get them back in but maybe I am being too pessimistic. Only Time will tell!