How To Win Time

 

Thankfully unaware of the on-going drama at Much Malarkey Manor, I am scooting along on my bicycle quite happily now. I am getting the hang of the shiny red button pushing which is proving to be a very efficient way of distributing presents to all the child-inhabited houses in every village, town and city through which I pass. I wish only that I could make better progress between each location and toy with the notion that maybe my resolution for the fast approaching Year of 2022 should be to improve my fitness levels. I don’t toy with it long. I’m not a fan of exercise and have managed without it fairly successfully for the past five decades or so.

‘I don’t suppose I could prevail upon you to do a bit of pedalling for a while?’ I say to Bambino as I heave my way up a particularly challenging incline.

‘In these shoes? I don’t think so,’ says Bambino Bobble Wilson.

True, he is wearing a particularly attractive pair of Regency style Cuban heels in peacock blue velvet with ornate silver buckles, but even so.

‘You could take them off,’ I suggest.

Bambino sighs. ‘Pull over,’ he says.

‘We haven’t time for unscheduled stops,’ I say. ‘It must be, what – at least two o’clock in the morning?’

‘Just stop!’ says Bambino, and he actually nudges past me and pulls on the brakes himself. I almost ricochet over the handlebars but luckily I have a firm grip, honed into perfection from years of gardening, bread making and prising cats from a variety of soft furnishings.

‘Look at your watch,’ says Bambino.

I do so and am surprised to see it is only half past midnight, barely fifteen minutes after setting off from Much Malarkey Manor.

‘Oh, the bloomin’ thing has stopped again,’ I say, giving the watch a shake and pulling out the little knob on the side to reset the time. ‘What’s the correct time, please?’

(And yes, I do still have a watch that has a little knob on the side to adjust the time and yes, it works perfectly well. New battery every couple of years or so. None of this high-falutin’ linked to the ether time keeping for me, thank you very much.)

‘It’s 0.31 hours,’ says Bambino Bobble Wilson, consulting his own high-tech smart watch. He scrolls through the data it has accrued. ‘We’ve been on the road for exactly 16 minutes. We have covered 575.34 kilometres, and you have burned 32003 calories. And I have slept for 13 minutes. No wonder I feel so tired,’ he finishes, stretching and yawning so widely his ears come together and form a point on the top of his head.

‘What??’ I say. ‘That can’t possibly be.’

‘The Smart watch never lies,’ says Bambino. ‘Although if you’ve burned 32003 calories I am baffled that you seem to be just as chubby as usual. Perhaps I need to reset the data. How much do you weigh?’

‘None of your business,’ I say. ‘You know, sometimes you can be VERY personal.’

‘Cats are naturally curious,’ says Bambino. ‘We can’t help it. Sometimes it is the death of us.’

I still can’t get my head around the fact we’ve been out for such a short space of time and travelled so far. Truly, it’s like I have slipped into a parallel Universe and I say as much to Bambino.

‘There’s a perfectly straightforward explanation,’ he says. ‘Time is relative, just as size is all to do with perspective. You know how time drags when you are waiting for something exciting or good to happen? And how it flies by when you are enjoying yourself?’

‘Time can also drag when you are somewhere you don’t want to be,’ I say, thinking of the number of pointless and dull as all the shades of grey staff meetings and training sessions I’ve wasted my life on over the years.

‘Exactly!’ says Bambino. ‘And that is why time is dragging now. You don’t want to be doing this job, do you? You want to be home, tucked up in bed with your flamingo hot water bottle, dreaming of happy things and counting your blessings, don’t you?’

‘Just that,’ I sigh.

‘So although your brain is telling you that there is waaaaay too much for you to achieve in the time you perceive you’ve got, what is actually happening is that time is slowing down because you are in a state of anxiety. Ironically, it’s a good thing. You are buying yourself time because of your very reluctance to be doing something you don’t want to do!’

Well, there’s a skewed logic in there somewhere, I think. But then I remember the time I sat in a staff meeting about changes the senior management team wanted to make to the Assessment for Learning policy. I distinctly remember going into the meeting thinking, ‘This is going to be a lot of rubbish and go on FOREVER,’ and then I sat to the side of the room (the best place to sit if you want to stay on the periphery of any sort of interactions), opened my notebook and wrote a short story whilst all the edu-psycho-drivel happened around me. And before I knew it, the meeting was coming to an end and everyone was leaving, muttering like fury about the waste of time and crock of s**t it had all been, except me because I’d written a jolly good story in what seemed like ten minutes!

‘Time to get going!’ says Bambino. ‘Only remember to think that you still don’t want to be doing this, or we SHALL start losing time.’