30 days hath September,
April, June and November,
All the rest have 31,
Excepting February alone.
Which has but 28 days clear
And 29 in each leap year.
I was at school with a leap year baby. She had to make her own birthday badges with the quarters written in each year. When we hit 18, we used to tell the barman not to serve her, because she was only 5 and a half.
And time is a funny thing. It’s all relative, says Einstein. It certainly is if you live on Mercury, where a bad day at the office would actually last 2 earth years. Even here, noon differs. Today in Inverness high noon is due at 1306 hrs, a full 16 minutes after high noon in London. So when Big Ben does chime, he’s actually fast. That’s one of the reasons we need the radio, to keep us all in time. Every train station used to use its own local time, so you can imagine the chaos before they introduced Railway Time in 1840, base-lined on Greenwich.
We like to imagine time is a constant, because we like to imagine we can manage time. But of course we can’t, we can only ever manage ourselves. The clock will tick on, whether we ‘waste’ time or ‘spend’ it wisely. The average person will use up 25 years of their life sleeping, which has already wiped out quite a lot of your allotted span.
What will you do with the rest of it? Graveyards are full of messages from the dead to the living about that: Tempus Fugit – time flies – or Carpe Diem – seize the day. It’s so easy to feel in a rush. If only I had more time! I’m so busy! But when I relax a little about time, and notice its quixotic personality, I can enjoy the time passing a little more. That’s another poem I learned at school: What is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare?
And perhaps none of us really need to be in quite such a hurry. After all, oak trees in the forest don’t usually produce acorns until they are 50 years old. We may yet still have all the time in the world…
