Time: it flexes like a whore

The Romans didn’t know it was the year 400 BC

“The clock is an unforgiving slave-master: it chides you for not achieving the feasible in time past; it admonishes you to achieve the unfeasible in time future.”

Ancient wisdom: exactly 61 years, 7 months and 28 days ancient.

Arab camel herdsmen in the north of Africa wear no watch: time is a matter of available daylight. They simply observe the sun’s passage across the sky. That is time enough. If you want to know the time, wear a wristwatch.

It is the railways that invented time. Prior to their construction, time consisted of a morning — daybreak and forenoon — plus an afternoon, with its stop at 3 for tea, after which, an evening — sunset or sundown, dusk and, finally, the night. Words like sundown, dusk, dawn, daybreak: they’re consigned now to archaisms and poetry; because we no longer use them to describe the parts of our human days; instead we use times like 5.43 a.m. And 9.25 a.m. No one who writes poetry knows these times. They are meaningless. Ante meridian: how do we even know we’ll live to see the 12 o’clock meridian? We measure time as if the Romans knew the year was 400 B.C.

A day used to be measured from the sun’s apogee to the sun’s apogee: from midday to midday. We knew it was midday because we had sun dials. Nowadays, we measure it from midnight to midnight, when a sun dial is useless, and render that as the ignominious “00.00 hours”: we use “nothing” as our prime temporal reference point in our existence.

They couldn’t use midnight back when: there was no sun at midnight. And times like 5.43 and 9.25 are artificial times. So artificial that we need precision chronometers to tell us they are even there, otherwise, they would fly past us without so much as a moment’s thought. We are slaves to meaningless precision.

It was the railways that invented times like 5.43 a.m. Before that, there was no such thing as 5.43 a.m. It was called “daybreak”, if daybreak it marked; 9.25 was “the early forenoon.” People knew that the one was about 3, or perchance 4, hours after the other — they felt it. They didn’t need to watch a second hand click around the face of an Omega. If they needed more precision, there was always a church clock chiming out quarter, half or full hours for those who needed to be somewhere.

The railways invented time in order to publish schedules. Their schedules were swiftly followed by the invention of the “appointments book.” But even appointments books don’t include the time “9.25 a.m.” The railways invented 9.25 as a train departure or arrival time. It’s a time that trains run to. They invented it, because they have trains to run. And it is we who run for the trains that they run. We run because clocks chase us. The clocks we keep in sight because of railway trains.

Time is money: and that is arrant nonsense. Time isn’t money. Time is the excuse for money. Time is the excuse to squeeze productivity out of production line workers. Time is the excuse, measured from balance sheet date to balance sheet date, to churn out bonuses to high management, the reward for the squeezing they’ve exacted of their workers over the “period to.” Labour exacted equals bonus earned. Bonus earned secures longevity in the post; secures exhaustion, burnout and shortened life expectancies among those who get the squeeze. Few are the businesses for which time is money for all in the business; and the word “stakeholder” was invented as an ultimate smokescreen, such as a magician would use, to mean “all”, “no one” and everyone in-between. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Bowie wrote and superbly performed his song Five Years as a plea: what if we only had five years? What would you do if you knew you only had five years? Around the world, cancer, HIV and other disease sufferers know only too well that they have five years, four years, six months or even less. Does that change their outlook, give them perspective, give them compassion and understanding? Listen to the bold drumbeat intro and outro. And then listen to your heart.

If you have five years in a company, it’s already over the average. But no one’ll hire a 60-year-old, even if, should they work with you, with their accumulated knowledge and experience, for only the average four years, they’d still be leaving before retirement age. Time’s not money when it’s time past. What use is an employee to a company if they can’t run for a 9.25 train?

Time — he’s waiting in the wings
He speaks of senseless things,
His script is you and me, Boy.
Time — he flexes like a whore,
Falls wanking to the floor,
His trick is you and me, Boy.

Time — in quaaludes and red wine
Demanding Billy Dolls
And other friends of mine —
Take your time.

The sniper in the brain,
Regurgitating drain,
Incestuous and vain,
And many other last names.
Well, I look at my watch it says nine-twenty-five and I think,
“Oh, God! I’m still alive.”

We should be on by now.