The Twenty Five Hour Day

I vaguely knew that the the clocks changed this weekend but I wasn't sure if they went forward or back. So I thought I would look it up on that internet thing and it would tell me. Well it told me what daylight saving was but not what to do with the clocks. Eventually I did find the information I wanted but that's the problem with search engines , you need to be in tune with how it searches and be exact in what you state what you are looking for.

For the first time in my life I've realised that this is actually a twenty five hour day, and although my clocks say it's nine o'clock we have have ten hours so far today. Also most digital devices update themselves so you you know what time it is but you have to manually changes your unconnected devices , so that's my watches that still work , three clocks and the cooker which I reset yesterday.

I remember, many years back, getting through to Monday and not realising the the clocks should have been changed. I remember Catweazle being surprised that we let ourselves be effectively ruled by an alarm clock. When I searched Catweazle on Amazon one of the first thigs that came back was "Whips and Exorcists!" (see below) , god knows why, though the normal search is free of such things.

The twenty five hour day concept reminds me of "The Eighty Minute Hour" short story by Brian Aldiss where the powers that be control all timepieces and slow them down when you work and speed them up when you are doing things that you want. Does that sound like real life?

So the song I've gone with is "Hard Times" by the Human League , great minimalist eighties synth that mutates into it's original source "Love Action"

The New Time

One of the problems with getting older is that the days seem to get shorter and you seem to have less time to do things, well that's how I feel. A number of people with children want to get the children back to school mainly because they are missing their friends, and of course looking after young children 24/7 is not an easy task.

The thing is that six weeks of lockdown for a six year old is a fiftieth of their life , where for me it's one five hundredth so it seems a lot longer for them that it does for me although the actual time is the same.

I am now trying to find a way of perceiving time in the same way that a child does and see a week's holiday or even a weekend as a long time. A weekend is around 62 hours from work finish to work start for most Monday to Friday workers and we should be able to see that as time to enjoy and do things.

I'm often reminded of "The Eighty Minute Hour" by Brian Aldiss where the controllers speed up clocks when we are not at work and slow them down when we are at work, and if that were happening  would we know?

People often waste weeks wishing for Friday , I used to be like that but now think "What Can I Do Today?" . If you are always looking forward to Friday you effectively throw away five days of your week , and the weekend is only two days so that makes your time seem to fly by.

My aim is not only to slow time down , but to do more in that time. I often am bothered by going for
walks because , by it's nature, that takes time, although usually I listen to music while walking as they are complimentary activities and listening to music can almost make the activity go faster. The paradox is that you want to finish your walk , but you want to enjoy your time doing it and if time speeds up you feel you are losing out.

Matt Haig wrote one of his excellent books "How To Stop Time" which also took this as part of his premise, and his self help page from "Reasons To Stay Alive" is excellent , so I am now FEELING TIME as well as taking my final part in the #maywriteabit , because tomorrow is the first of June.

So what song should we go with , there are many songs called "Time" , Pink Floyd and David Bowie come to mind, and even "Five Years Time" by Noah and the Whale and "Minutes" by The Human League came to mind.

I decided to go with "The Waiting" by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers as it is sort of appropriate for the position we are in now and does contain a lot of pertinent lines to the lockdown situation.