Time And Money

“The twenty-four hour day has come to stay,” wrote Max Beerbohm, who lived from the late 19th to mid-20th century. He wasn’t entirely right.

Fly from New Zealand to California, for example, and you arrive nine hours before you started despite the twelve-hour journey. That makes a forty-five hour day! In the opposite direction, you leave in the evening and arrive two mornings later. Before landing in Auckland you will have experienced the ultimate in lost time, the zero-hour day! People have been known to riot for less.

Yet it has been worse. When the Gregorian Calendar was first introduced in 1582 no fewer than ten days were lost to make up for discrepancies in the Julian system, more than ten days in countries which changed at later dates. Many people were outraged, convinced their lives had been correspondingly shortened. Airline passengers, however, seldom make a fuss.

There are, of course, many lesser examples, not involving the International Date Line or change of calendar. Move from any time zone to another and you lengthen or shorten your day, or your playing time — in the north of Sweden there’s a golf course that straddles the Finnish border, with a one-hour time difference from one side to the other.

Twice a year, with the beginning or end of summer time (or daylight saving), you don’t even have to pack a case or golf bag to get an hour added to, or subtracted from, your day.

Now in theory, the forty-five hour day has much to commend it. I have only to think of all I could do that I never have time for to see its attractions. Having experienced it a number of times, however, I know the result to be disorientation, fatigue and days wasted in trying to recover. So perhaps it’s wisest to stay within Beerbohm’s bounds.

What worries me is that the length of his hours seems to have changed. I swear they are getting shorter and shorter. The days disappear! Weeks flash by. The years roll on at an accelerating pace. I have only to blink and hey presto! — there isn’t a hope of doing a quarter of what I’d intended. I should complain to the police, the Government, the public time-keeper (if there isn’t one, there should be). What we need are daywatchmen! My kingdom for honest, trustworthy, vigilant, time-protecting persons prepared to fight for every minute.

When I think of all my unfinished projects; of those hundreds upon hundreds of slides and negatives that have been waiting in vain to be scanned and join the many thousands of unprocessed digital images on my hard drive; of the dozens of books I’ve been meaning to read but don’t (I go on acquiring them at the same rate regardless); of the films I mean to see but never do; of the concerts and sporting events I don’t get to; of the exhibitions I miss; I can only ask: where does the time go to? WHERE? And the only answer I can come up with is that it is being stolen. From under my very nose!

It isn’t as though I spend countless hours in front of the box. Why, I’m a disgrace to the good statistical name of the Scandinavian nation in which I reside, a traitor who simply doesn’t care. Every respectable home in the country has at the very least one large television set, which, if it is not to hide its head in shame will have a very flat panel and offer the chance to flick through an extraordinary number of channels. Not mine. There was a time when I had no TV at all. And I have never subscribed to any of the cable services or owned a video recorder of any description, seldom watching (free-to-air) programmes once let alone over again.

I must have been a prime suspect for the telecommunications people’s unpaid-licence-detecting brigade. What a hope they had! They could have sat outside my door for ever with that magic contraption of theirs during my total abstinence period without registering the faintest blip or bleep. They did knock once. I’m sure they didn’t believe me when I told them the situation. Mind you, I didn’t dare say I haven’t a mobile phone or car either. You can’t stretch the limits of credibility too far. Neither did I claim to be unemployed. Why, if they depended on me, the likes of Nokia, Sony-Eriksson and all the car makers of this world would go out of business, and then where would we be?

Nix. Time is being taken away from me, I say. From others too. I think I now understand why so many men shave their heads. They never manage to make it to the barber. W.H.Davies would have understood the situation perfectly:
What is this life if full of care
There is no time to cut your hair?

And time, we are told, is money, which could help explain why my bank balance is in such an unhealthy state. But only in part. On all other counts it should be bursting with well-being and you don’t have to be much of a mathematician to work out why.

Take the price of a packet of cigarettes. Multiply it by two, or three, or four. Multiply that by fifty-two and the answer by the number of years that have elapsed since I would have started smoking if I’d had sufficient talent to learn. Enter the total in the right hand column. Then start on the beer and do the same. All right? Now take wine and spirits. And steaks. Put all the totals beneath each other.

Then add a small down-payment on a modest vehicle plus monthly instalments on same. Don’t forget repairs and maintenance. And fuel. Then take a telly box of anything other than diminutive proportions, and video recorder, or hard-disk system. Include cable TV charges for many years and licence fees for some. And a cell phone - or phones. No self-respecting person sticks with an old model.

Unless you are sleeping in the street, these are just the bare, normal, natural essentials of life in acountry such as Sweden. Without a phone to your ear, or at least in your hand, you are likely to suffer from desperate feelings of loneliness and isolation when travelling on those moving call centres, the Stockholm underground trains. OK, I have a computer, but not the latest and greatest and without it I would have been destitute long ago, so that doesn’t count.

Right. Add it all up. Make additional allowance for a modest, accumulated rate of interest, minus tax. And you see what you get? Well where is it? WHERE IS IT?

There is only one conclusion to be drawn: whoever is stealing my time is making sure he has the means to enjoy it!