A brief history of time
ONCE upon a time I had a small child, a little girl, who loved dolls and prams and bedtime stories.
Then – and I swear this is true – I popped out for an hour or so and when I came back she was 21 and a student in London with more piercings than I think is strictly necessary in a nose.
The advent of her big birthday this week – landing as it does as we move towards the first anniversary of one lockdown and as we begin to contemplate coming out of another – has prompted me to consider the nature of time.
One-year Covid anniversaries loom, while simultaneously we’ve been gazing at old photos of the daughter spanning two decades.
And oddly, it all sort of feels the same.
Time is an odd construct, isn’t it? In a time BC (before Covid) we lived our lives by the tyranny of the clock. Time to get up, time to go to work, hit a deadline, to be on time for an appointment. Lunchtime, dinnertime, wine o’clock – we lived by what our watches and phones told us to do.
For many of us there weren’t quite enough hours in the day. “Where did the week go?” we’d ask’ wondering how it got to be Friday again so quickly. “If only we had more time!”
And then suddenly – we did. With nothing to do and nowhere to go and with a chunk of us on furlough or working from home we had, in theory, endless hours of the stuff to fill. Except if you were home schooling of course – if you were home schooling you’re probably still hiding in a kitchen cupboard with a gin bottle and aren’t reading this anyway.
Lockdown afforded us more space in our lives to learn French or perfect a risotto or read all those books and see all those films we never quite got round to when time was against us.
What an opportunity! And what a load of rubbish, because naughty time has had its way again and this last 12 months has passed simultaneously at a snail’s pace and in a flash and very few of us have read those books or seen those films and the nation’s risottos remain soggy.
There were periods when this last year crawled by like a permanent Sunday teatime in 1978.
Yet there were others when I woke up and wondered who had stolen the previous three months.
What’s that you say? It’s March? Already? How?
Perhaps it has something to do with so much happening in the world and yet so little. No holidays or exams or weddings or concerts – or 21st birthday bashes for that matter, just a big fat global crisis to occupy us all.
For Gina’s birthday we made all those old photos into a video for her. In it she moves seamlessly from baby to toothy toddler, from schoolgirl to uni student to young woman.
21 years gone in a flash, yet I remember rainy afternoons without end trying to keep her and her brother entertained.
I remember my mum telling me to ‘live in the moment’ and remember the now because childhood is over too fast.
In a way, perhaps the last two decades aren’t so different to the last 12 months in terms of time bending and twisting and confusing us all.
And when we look back on it all we’ll be able to say ‘look how far we’ve come’.