What time do you call this?

 

Ledbury, Herefordshire

As the clocks turned back an hour from BST to UTC, most of them now automatically, even the weather seemed to notice. Dead leaves fell from the trees overnight. The next day I was watching a documentary on S4C, the Cymraeg language TV channel which punches above its weight in thoughtful and provocative programming. Here, without a hint of patronising anthropology, Kristoffer Hughes, mortician, funeral officiant and Druid, explores death customs around the world. In Toraja, Sulawesi (Indonesia), he meets families who periodically disinter their dear departed, dress them and pose for photos with them propped up. As if they are, in part, still here. Panpsychists perhaps. Whatever the clocks might say, the past is still very much with us. 

Early in the process of learning my new language, the distinction was made between mistakenly asking “Be ydy’r amser?” (what is [the] time?), and correctly asking “Faint o’r gloch ydy hi?” (how much is it from the clock?). A tutor pointed out that the former is closer to a philosophical question about the meaning of time. I also learned other conceptual differences. “Wythnos” (a week) is literally a period of eight nights, Saturday to Saturday; just as a fortnight, “pythefnos” means fifteen nights. Think about it. Even more time for your money perhaps.

Elsewhere, someone in Arctic Nunavut (Canada), when asked what time meant, replied “nine to five”, as if a European construct that only exists during working hours. Well into retirement, having had no “9-5” for 16 years now, I'm happily unscheduled. It’s a comforting thought, and a lucky escape (prisoners also "do time"), considering that many people traditionally received a clock as a retirement gift. A ticking reminder of one’s eventual fate. 

An assault on the subjectivity of time came with the standardisation of railway timetables. “Real” (siderial) time varies by as much as 90 minutes from east to west across Britain and Ireland, as can be seen in the difference between sunrise and sunset times (longer in larger countries that use just one time-zone) which kicks back against this convenient compromise. Faced with these temporal distortions and, sadly, the unreliability of timetables, I can always let the brain take the strain. 

Clearly, with age, there are more memories of the past than will be made in the future. But the future is not there in the same way as the past and the present. Even as words enter this page, they are embedded in a past still present. Conceptually there is no tomorrow. No such thing. Enter Growing Block Theory, stage left. Left field. I am no cosmologist, and have little knowledge of quantum mechanics. But the easiest way I’ve found to understand the century-old idea is to say that time doesn’t pass; it just gets bigger, along with expanding space. Some experts argue against Growing Block Theory just because it sounds too much like common sense. Unlike tree rings which grow from the inside, we exist on the outside surface of a growing Lego construction set, in which its innards are inert, and allegedly forever beyond our ken. Or are they?

The mind at least can access echoes from inside the block. Every word you have just read is now within the block, brought alive again on re-reading. I only need to visit somewhere once, and I am there for eternity. It saves a fortune on air-fares. In the continuous present, I can revisit impressions in my head, maybe an emotion, a sound, a smell or a vague image. The level of detail is immaterial; it’s good enough for me. 

“Faint o’r gloch?”. How much time [on the clock]? More than there was a moment ago.  

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I look forward to your comments. Also it would be nice to know where you are in the world. Thanks for reading.

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