Time And (my) Relatives’ Dimensions in Space

A French Decimal Clock. I mean, really...

Ooh, the arbitrary nature of how we measure time. My eldest gives a little shout of triumph whenever he notices that the clock on the microwave happens to agree with that on the oven. This occurs more often than he thinks, as they are only out of synch by about twenty seconds, but this is obviously enough of a disparity to irk him. The poor boy has a sensitivity for such things, since even before we moved to America. One October, a couple of years ago, I tried to explain to him about how we were putting the clocks back. Whatever he thought we were doing, the idea terrified him so much that the colour drained from his face and he almost burst into tears. Time to him then was still something immutable and not to be jiggered about with.

But, boy, have we been jiggering about with it. Living six hours around the world is weird, as I have often remarked. Basically, I miss a lot of the cricket, never hear the Today programme and ‘Sailing By’ is now what Radio 4 plays at a quarter to seven to tell me it’s time to have a drink. We jigger about with time when we go home too, like we did this December for my sister’s wedding. The flight there was nothing more than a fractured nap and being in Britain for a week was mildly unsettling as my body clock drifted, failing to grip hold of GMT. Finally the flight back becomes an interminable afternoon of steady sunlight as the day stretches to make up time.

The source of all this confusion is the discrepancy between how we think we measure time, the tinny numbers and numerals on our wrists and screens, and how we instinctively measure it: the length of shadows, a quality of the light, the slow dance of sun and moon. If these sidereal rhythms weren’t already subordinate to our clocks and calendars, then today’s date would have utterly no significance whatsoever. But as it is, we have invented numbers to count the hours and then subdivided and then subdivided, again and again, into hypothetical fractions of seconds. We have named the days and the months and spent generations arguing about them. Perplexed as to why it doesn’t quite work we have to drop in leap days and seconds, all the while doggedly counting the years forwards from something that borders on mythology.

If this sounds like a grump, then I must earnestly say that it isn’t. I find all this fascinating and am delighted that days like this exist. If nothing else, they should make us see that Time, as we understand it in terms of TV schedules and decades, is another lie that we take for granted. Like the roads, like plumbing and wiring, it is another layer of infrastructure that we have invented. And, like all those things, it is delivered locally: 2010 has been going for about eight hours now in the Pacific and it’ll be nearly breakfast time in Britain by the time both hands point to 12 here in Houston.

And what am I going to do if I hear Big Ben at 6pm this evening? However arbitrary these counts and notches are, we submit to them utterly so that even our moods and emotions are manipulated by these imaginary numbers: a new year offers catharsis, a chance to think in longer terms. My status for today was going to be: “Hey you don’t call me at 6pm to wish me a Happy New Year and I won’t call you at 6am, deal?”. But in truth I will be torn – although arbitrary, these temporal divisions hold water because of mutual consensus and the collected belief of one’s friends and family count for a lot. So whilst you are all bonging and clinking and Auld Lang Syning in the UK, I might well be allowing the kids to experience some actual time travel.

Happy New Year!