The time in Oxford? 5 minutes,2 seconds behind London!
HERE’S a book about time, in all its many manifestations. i had to read it in a tearing rush and write about it in an awful hurry, but that only affected my enjoyment of it, not its considerable merits.
Simon Garfield is fascinated by the way our lives are dominated by time. We never seem to have enough. i’m reasonably confident that i’ve got tomorrow, but anything beyond the weekend is in the lap of the gods.
This is, in truth, a huge and possibly ungraspable subject, and Garfield, to his credit, does not even try to grasp it.
instead, he flitters cheerfully across the surface, telling stories, going places and seeing people, and moving the whole thing along sufficiently quickly that you don’t really notice the lack of heft. You are, in short, too busy being entertained.
The arrival of railways in the 1840s did more than just link up the cities of Britain. it forced them to synchronise their times. Clocks in Oxford ran five minutes and two seconds behind London time. Those in Bristol were ten minutes behind and those in Exeter 14 minutes. But with railways came the railway timetable. A new time consciousness affected all who travelled. The concept of ‘punctuality’ was born anew.
The Beatles recorded the whole of their first album, excluding a few singles, in a day. Their entire career lasted only seven years. Mark Lewisohn’s All These Years, a forensic account of the Beatles and their world, will probably take him 30 years to write. he’s already ten years in and only one volume of a projected four has appeared.
TED talks (internet lectures) are all exactly 18 minutes long. One of TED’s creators described this as ‘the sweet spot’: it gives the speaker time to be serious, but not to be academic; neither speaker nor audience has
time to get bored; and it’s perfect for sharing online because it’s about the length of a coffee break.
The phrase to describe the feeling of hopelessness in the face of time is ‘frenetic standstill’.
One of the best chapters is about the watch industry, whose innumerable advertisements, as Garfield points out, are keeping print journalism alive. (‘Open the New York Times and the paper appears to be ticking.’)
Garfield visits a trade show for watches, which covers 140,000 square metres in Basel. Jose Mourinho has flown in to act as ‘brand ambassador’ for Hublot and there are 4,000 journalists present, ‘almost certainly more than covered two world wars’. And all this for a product that no one really needs. We have phones, don’t we? Who needs a watch?
It’s a matter of status, apparently. ‘Suited and moneyed men don’t get away with wearing much jewellery these days . . . so a watch solves all desires and expectations.’
A man who runs a watch museum says he’s not afraid of the Apple Watch. What scares him is the day when men accept they could wear gemstones ‘without a time-keeping pretext’.
Good grief, is that the time? It’s time I was gone.