Time and Tide
Alice: “How long is forever?”
White Rabbit: “Sometimes, just one second.”
We spend it, we lose it, we use it, we waste it, we mark it, we count it, we save it, we even claim to make it. And, like Cher, we’d so like to turn it back, especially when we start running out of it. Sometimes, it just stands still. The hourglass is maybe the most poignant symbol of the passing of time and mortality. Mortality being our own personal allocation of this illusory substance. We, in the general scheme of All Things, are just an ephemeral electro-magnetic fizz. HGWells said, “Time is only a kind of Space”, and being the father of science fiction, it would be unwise to start an argument about that.
When you live longtime on the banks of a river, you are constantly teased by the notion of time. The sun rises and sets, delivering light, as does the moon, who drags the sea back and forth. They three are our primal time-lords, delivering the rhythms within which we, and all other earth dwellers, adapt and survive. But rivers just keep on running regardless.
Our agreed notion of time passes by at sixty minutes an hour, twenty four times a day, three hundred and sixty fiveish times a year. A system that helps us coordinate and organise our little lives, our societies, our world. Yet now, technology allows us to circumvent it all and have simultaneous global experiences. Meanwhile, we all swim around in this illusory soup of time and space, where years become our significant milestones, which we boisterously celebrate as it all hurtles by.
Ancient Egyptians had gnomons, tall sundials, to measure time, and at night, they used a merkhet - two bars aligned to the pole star. But because of all the variations, universal time was still a few millennia away, though the Greeks and Romans tried hard to spread timekeeping around. Mechanical clocks appeared only in the 15th century, around the time that Chaucer pronounced that time and tide waiteth for no man. The first weight-driven clocks appeared in medieval Catholic churches to raise a call to prayer. The word clock comes from ‘clocca’, the old French word for bell.
We are still finding new ways to keep it, measure it and interpret it, and live with it, and Dr Who keeps us all on our toes. Today I saw a picture of a rare plant that had just bloomed, scientists having successfully raised a seed found in the stomach of a squirrel that had died 32,000 years ago. A truly seasoned time traveller.
Tonight, I am indulging my own fast draining hourglass with a brief tardis flirt with time & tide. Sixty earth years ago I stood alone and windswept on Aberystwyth promenade for the first time as a fledgeling student. Within a few short years I had lived and learned hard and fast, the seafront a constant reference point and confidant. I studied Aristotle in gothic towers within yards of it, partied the length of it, lived close to it, shared my hopes and fears with it, flirted with its wrath and learned to respect it. I have continued to live relatively nearby, but it is many decades since I have slept alongside it. The sea here has a very distinctive voice, tempered by the gravelly sands, the resistant bedrocks, and man’s defiant restraints. Now I am perched high in an empty off-season seafront hotel where long ago I chambermaided to pay my overdrafts. And there’s a rising guttural storm. The elements are yammering and whistling at the ill-fitted window where, snug within a Victorian tardis, I ponder on my inner Russian dolls and take hazy stock of our journeys. I’ll soon be rocked into sleep by this familiar old hullabaloo lullaby, and away on a roller dreamcoaster. Nos da.