Time is a pretty odd thing when you think about it. You can’t see it or touch it but it’s there just the same. As far as I understand, time is uniform, it bumbles along at exactly the same speed, year after year. There are always 24 hours in any given day and 365 days in every year, except of course for leap years. I mentioned last week about encountering each new birthday with a sense of apprehension. After all, each birthday brings me closer to my inevitable end, my dying day but it seems to me that as we get older, time seems to speed up and the months and years pass by faster and faster.
Perhaps that’s a consequence of nearing the latter stages of my journey through life. Recently when we were travelling through France motoring along through the endless country lanes of the Loire valley, it seems as if I only became aware of the speed when I reached a new village or hamlet and had to slow down. Perhaps that’s the way it is with time too, that you only notice the passing of time with some new event, something that brings time into perspective.
One of my friends has a daughter born on my birthday and the other day the child’s grandmother mentioned to me that she would be soon off to school. School already I thought? After all, I still think of that child as a baby, which clearly she no longer is. (Quick check and the little girl in question was born in 2019!)
In the boot of my car are two big yellow anoraks with reflective stripes. I put them there in case I ever break down on the motorway although they were given to me when I first joined the Highways Agency. They were compulsory clothing for being out and about seeing the motorway network first hand with our traffic officers, our area contractors and the police. I remember being out with the motorway police for a day and looking down at the speedometer as we made our way to an RTC and seeing it registering 120mph. That was an interesting day but it was actually back in 2005, 18 years ago. Can those yellow jackets really be 18 years old?
Music is another thing that always registers the passing of time. In the pub quiz that we visit every Thursday there is always a music section. The quizmaster plays 10 tracks and asks for three answers for each; the title, the artist and the year. We are helped in the year aspect as the DJ plays two tracks from each of ten decades and gives us the year endings. Now back in the 1980’s I was at the height of my love of vinyl singles. I bought singles every week, usually when they dropped out of the charts and were sold off at half price and not only that, later in the 80’s I bought my first video recorder and spent a lot of time recording my favourite music on video. What this means is that I should be spot on with the 80’s music but a lot of the time I sadly am not. Last week at the quiz, one of the tracks was Red Light Spells Danger, a hit by Billy Ocean which I was convinced was 1987. Actually it was older and was released in 1977. Fortunately Liz’s recollection was better than mine.
I have always been one for skimming through records and CDs, especially when the word ‘sale’ can be seen. Some years ago, a prime location for buying cheap CDs was Woolworths which sadly went bankrupt in 2015. In Woolworths many years ago I picked up a compilation CD. It had some really nice tracks and a few I’d never heard of but I chose it particularly because of one track, ‘Horse with no Name’ by America. I’ve always loved that song and I don’t have a copy of it so I bought the CD. Later when I had got home and played the album I was surprised to find another track that I hadn’t spotted earlier, it was Desiderata, a poem by Max Ehrman made into a pop song, of sorts, by an American guy called Les Crane.
Now not only is that poem one of my favourites but so is the musical version. It was played a lot at school by our headmaster in the morning services and as soon as I heard it again it brought memories of those long ago schooldays flooding back to me: The registrations, the morning assembly, the prayers. Back in the late sixties a lot of those morning assemblies were about Vietnam and how our headmaster, Mr Trickett wove his morning address from Vietnam to the Desiderata, I do not know but that musical version was something I loved and finding it again on a CD was like getting part of my youth back.
Quite a few years back Liz and I visited many of the war cemeteries in Northern France and like many others were moved by the many monuments to those who lost their lives in two world wars. I made a video about the many war memorials we came across and in the video commentary I spoke about the passing of time.
I have a theory about time and it’s this, it’s that time flows differently in different places. OK; sounds a bit mad doesn’t it? Let me explain further.
On many occasions when trundling through rural France I’ve come across many bunkers, fortresses and other sites. In northern France Liz and I stopped at a war grave cemetery that was picture perfect in its own way. The lawns were incredibly neat, and the hedgerows immaculately trimmed. Sadness pervaded the site like a scent coming over from the adjacent fields. Throughout there is a feeling of peace, of slowness and a feeling that time has stopped here or perhaps just slowed. That’s not strange when you think that time must have speeded up during the action of the first and second world wars, so it seems only fair that nature must compensate, that time must slow later to make up for the fast and frantic earlier time.
You can imagine the pace of things even a hundred years ago: The early morning bombardment, the whistles blowing as officers called their troops to go over the top. The advance parties who made ahead to cut the barbed wire, the troops walking apprehensively forward until they walked into the deadly machine gun fire that cut most of them down. Many found their final resting places in these cemeteries, places that are now quiet and peaceful with a silent beauty, timeless and moving with the beat of nature as a backdrop; the humming of the insects, distant cows mooing, and the birds flying past.
All the places we visited have had their moments in the spotlight of world history. They all lived through times of accelerated pace when time flowed swiftly. Perhaps it’s their time now for a quieter pace while time flows slowly.
Back to me then and my 67 birthdays. Time as I mentioned seems to speed up with age but there is still time to mention one more thing.
Time for a cup of tea!
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I’ve had 67 birthdays now which is quite a considerable number and one thing is certain, I won’t get another 67. This year I took my birthday off Facebook, I’m not sure why, perhaps I just don’t want people to know I’m so ancient. Perhaps inwardly I’m ashamed of being old but either way, Liz posted birthday wishes on Facebook so removing my birthday was a pretty pointless exercise. Anyway, together, Liz and I had a pretty lovely week.
It’s always good to come back home and yet, at the same time, it’s always sad to leave your holiday destination. As you arrive back in rainy and cold UK, you can be sure that someone else is sitting on your sun lounger, sipping wine from your glass and contemplating a dip in your pool. Oh well, there’s always next year to look forward to.
It always happens to me when I’m away. I know I’ve written about this before but the National Lottery has been annoying me. Here I am away from home and I get an email saying check your account, you’ve won a prize. Great! I wonder what is it? The million-pound jackpot or £3.42 on the Thunderball? I’m guessing it’s the £3.42. Either way, the National Lottery site cannot be accessed from abroad so I’ll just have to wait until I’m back in the UK before I find out if I’m a millionaire -or not.
Faithful by Marianne Faithful.
What makes someone want to be a writer? Is it a need to emulate our own writing heroes or something else. I mentioned in a post last week that it’s important to be creative and we can be creative in a huge number of ways, not just in traditional artistic pursuits but also in everyday things, decorating our homes for instance, posting on social media, putting together a CD music mix or many other things.
Coward has really been a surprising writing hero to me. I’ve been aware of him for years through film and television and his slightly eccentric persona has always been a little amusing to me. I remember once seeing an interview with him on the stage at the BFI, (British Film Institute) Richard Attenborough was interviewing him and seemed to me to be treating him as some sort of God that had been beamed down from the heavens. Coward was puffing away on a cigarette and lapping up all the praise.
1977 was a different world. There was no internet and there were no mobile phones. The only phones were landlines and they were big and heavy with great rotary dials with which you had to laboriously dial a number. As more people wanted telephones they needed more numbers and so numbers got longer and longer. 061, the dialling code for Manchester became 0161 and the code for London which was 01 became two new codes 071 and 081
Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:
Anne was the template for the character of Anne in my book 
James Hilton is one of my personal writing heroes and yet his name may be unfamiliar to many of you reading this blog. He was a journalist and an author and made the trip from his home in Leigh, Lancashire, (now Greater Manchester) in the UK to the Hollywood hills in the United States to become a screen writer. He is probably more well known for his book ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ which was made into a film with Robert Donat (actually another northerner from Didsbury in Manchester) but my favourite of his books and quite possibly my all-time favourite book is ‘Lost Horizon’.
I’ve got a few new books to read but I thought I’d save them for my next holiday. I had an idea recently for a blog about the Carry On films so I picked up this book for a bit of research even though I read it a few years ago.
Barbara died in December, 2020 but the Carry On films just literally carry on. Most weeks you can find one showing on one of the many TV channels now available. In her book, Barbara has a bit of a moan that despite the longevity of the films, the stars never made a pennly from all the numerous TV repeats of the films. Still, how many people thought the films would be still popular years after their first release? The first film was Carry on Sergeant made in 1958 and the last one, Carry on Columbus was released in 1992. Altogether there were 31 films, four Christmas specials, various stage versions and numerous TV shows. All the main stars, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor and many others are long gone. The only major star of the films still alive in 2023 is Jim Dale, now aged 87.
I went to another funeral this week. It was someone I knew only very slightly and in fact Liz knew the deceased much more than me. His name was John and he was a pretty nice guy. The funeral service though seemed to me to be a little bit flat, a little lacking in soul. There was no priest or reverend at the service, just the celebrant. She read out a history of John’s life and family, someone came up to read a sad poem and his Grandson played a tune on his guitar.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 