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TIME-WASTERS

I COULD really have used that hour we lost pre-dawn yesterday when the clocks sprung forward. Harsh, too, that the leap coincided with Mother’s Day, effectively nulling the prized Sunday lie-in of millions.

Ahead of me I have one of those weeks you want to run away from: a tumult of work deadlines, parental end-of-term duties, bills to be paid and pre-travel panics.

Somewhere in that queasy jostle, there is also a trampolining eighth birthday party and an eight-hour train journey northwards — I am quite looking forward to the latter’s enforced sit-down.

There will be frantic moments this week when I will wistfully regret the lost hours squandered in the preceding fortnight, idly scrolling through Instagram, Facebook or newsletters I didn’t sign up to.

In the delightfully old-fashioned, analogue world of books, timewasters usually take not digital, but human form, often frustrating long-term romantic goals.

Tori Bailey, the protagonist of Holly Bourne’s quick-witted adult fiction debut, How Do You Like Me Now?, appears to have it all. After turning a quarter-life crisis into a bestselling memoir, Tori became a millennial superbrand, her every witticism and workout video liked by thousands.

But now, nearly 30, she feels more sham than success, adrift in a longterm relationship with a boyfriend too spineless to commit or quit.

The dashing John Willoughby, in Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility, seems sincere in his attentions to the romantic Marianne, but, just as an engagement seems imminent, he high-tails it to London, rather than risk his inheritance. The distraught Marianne, her reputation potentially compromised, succumbs to illness.

In Louise O’Neill’s Almost Love, the resentful anti-heroine Sarah blames childhood circumstances and almost everyone around her for her lack of fulfilment. There has been a masochistic relationship — and hours squandered grieving it. Can she navigate her way towards a better future?

Time waits for no one, so do try to seize your days.