I LONG TO BE ABLE TO READ A BOOK DURING THE DAY
Can anyone tell me what happened to April and May? They were gone before I had a chance to get to grips with them, and they are two of my favourite months of the year. I am told that it is something to do with age: it makes the days, the weeks and the months seem to speed by ever faster. It makes me feel resentful, especially when a bright day dawns after rain and the whole world seems to sparkle. I get up early as a rule, between 5am and 7am. But before I know where I am, it is dusk and the blackbird is singing from the chimney tops to signal the end of another 24 hours. Then I read that HS2 will cut the journey time from London to Birmingham by 20 minutes, and I am meant to be pleased. Life will then move even faster, for you can bet that the 20 minutes saved will be swallowed up somewhere, and that none of us will feel that we have gained time – simply reallocated it. I find myself musing on the likely consequences of such haste. When I first came to London from Yorkshire as a student in the late Sixties, the journey time by train from Leeds to London King’s Cross was about four-and-a-half hours. Now that journey can be accomplished in two-and-a-half. Do we need to make that journey even quicker, and if so, why? How fast is fast enough? We need new runways and new airports, we’re told. Why? If you can’t get on a flight, stay at home. It’s quite nice here and you don’t have to take off your belt and your shoes every time you want to go anywhere. Travel used to broaden the mind; now it simply irritates the pants off you (and the belt and the shoes). The same is true on the roads. That white van man who cuts you up – why does he need to go at such a lick? He is working, yes, and clearly has a laudable work ethic, but tomorrow he will have forgotten today and it will not make a jot of difference whether he arrived two minutes early or three minutes late. All he really did was annoy you and other road users. And why does he travel so close behind? Will those three or four yards he insists on taking up really make a difference to his time of arrival? Of course not: all that the lack of space between your back bumper and his front one will do is make him more tense as he chivvies you along, and you fearful that if a cat runs out in front of you, several tonnes of van will end up in your back seat. Every now and then, it would be good for all of us to assess the speed of our lives and see whether something can be done to reduce our miles per hour. I know that the hands of the clock will turn at exactly the same speed as they have done since time immemorial, but we can kid ourselves into feeling that they go just that little bit more slowly. Sitting and doing nothing is a good way of stretching time, although, for most of us, it is one of the hardest things to achieve. I long to be able to read a book during the day, for instance, without feeling guilty. I read every night in bed before turning out the light, but to open a book in daylight hours, except when on holiday, seems a criminal offence. Then there is sitting and staring. When did you last indulge yourself in such a hedonistic pursuit? I don’t mean sitting in the garden, spotting a weed and leaping up to pull it out. No; the real achievement is staring at it and leaving it exactly where it is. The pace of life is exacerbated in my own case by a pathological addiction to punctuality. I seldom arrive later than five minutes early. If I got up half an hour earlier, could I take the day more gently? Probably not. I would be swept along by the speed of other folks’ actions. Do not misunderstand me – I am not making a case for sloth, simply for a more sensible pace of life. Our predecessors seemed to have understood this rather better than us. The working lives of our grandparents, though hard in the extreme, were not, it seems to me, taken at such breakneck speed. They did not have to respond to emails within minutes; they could save up for a Penny Black, find the parchment paper and the sealing wax, the quill and the ink and carefully craft a reply that would then be dispatched by the mail coach. What a lovely thought… I cannot advocate a return to those tedious afternoons of Georgian Britain, when the upper classes needed to find umpteen pointless ways of killing time, but how I would love just half an hour where that was the problem to be faced. I never have to kill time – it commits suicide right in front of me. Most of us who imagine that retirement will offer a way of slowing the clock are living in cloud cuckoo land, for Parkinson’s law comes into play at exactly that moment, and the work expands to fill the time available. A friend who worked in a high-powered position on a national newspaper confessed to me that his life in retirement was so busy that he could not understand how he ever found the time to work. And yet, in the face of all these difficulties, I will strive to spin out my days, to remain serene and calm in the face of the frantic activity of those around me. Where possible, I will travel offpeak by train – always a calming pursuit, except for the days when they have engineering works, and I shall take an earlier train than I really need, so that if it is delayed, it won’t matter and I will have just managed to read more of that book that I felt guilty picking up. When the train approaches my destination, I will not stand up and get my coat from the rack before it has reached the station. No – I shall wait until the train has come to a halt and everyone else has elbowed each other out of the way. Then I will rise to my feet unhindered by a sea of bodies, take down my coat and my luggage, leave the train and walk down the platform after all the bustling passengers have departed. It is only a little gesture in the direction of a calmer life, and yet it might just be worth making. Is that the time? Must dash…