Being grandad involves giving the grandkids the only thing they truly want from you: your time, so it seems doubly ironic that this autumnal period of life in which, theoretically, you have more spare time to spend with them coincides with the moment when you become increasingly aware that it is very quickly ticking away. Many people far brainier than I (and I know that doesn’t narrow it down much) have stated that time is a man-made construct, and I would not begin to contest this – mainly because I don’t understand it – but I do know that the passage of time is not. Without it we would not get older, great concerts would not feel too short, worthy films would not seem too long and car journeys would not be filled with a million ‘are we there yet’s. Look into any bathroom mirror: you cannot deny the passage of time.
But time is, as we all know, elastic. See which passes more quickly, an hour with a good book and an even better whisky, or an hour in the dentist’s waiting room with root canal treatment just around the corner. It has the capacity to fly by when we don’t want it to and to really drag its heels when Celine Dion is on the radio.
And time, in a cosmic sense, is distance. Light years are the measurement of distance in space: how far light travels in a year, so if a year did not exist as a measurement of time then, obviously, everything would be in the same place at the same time, and kerboom! we all know the kind of trouble that can lead to. (I can’t help but wonder, space being a vacuum, whether The Big Bang might actually have been little more than a super-sized whisper. I was actually about to say that I am not even certain that sound can be transmitted through a total void, but then I thought of Donald Trump’s voice coming out of J D Vance’s arse…) I mean, whoever thought that it would be a good idea to measure distance in time? (It was that idiot Einstein again, wasn’t it? I already hold him personally responsible for everything I don’t understand.) It’s like taking my waist measurement in MPH – actually, given the way it is spreading, not such a bad idea. Mind you, if time and distance are the same thing then one cannot exist without the other: no time, no space – which puts us in a whole heap of trouble if my understanding of astrophysics is anything like solid (thankfully, it isn’t).
When you are young, you have so much time available to you that wasting a little bit of it really doesn’t matter, yet for a child it drags its feet over everything. A journey may take no more than an hour, but an hour takes forever. The distance between meals stretches out into eternity which explains why children are always hungry, but not why they won’t eat anything green. At my age a year can fly by without even a pause for thought between birthday cakes: a week in the blink of an eye. Remembering when things occurred becomes more difficult, not because of encroaching senility but because, as time rushes towards the finishing line, the spaces between things begin to compress. (Time, of course, does end for everyone and everything except, perhaps, for ‘The Archers’.) Life is a Slinky; time is the stairs.
I remember being a child – or, more correctly, my memory being about as reliable as that of an errant politician, the spirit of being a child (aided in this, my wife would argue, by the fact that I am in many respects still a child) and what I recall most clearly is the sensation of constantly waiting for something to happen. Life was never in the present, it was always about waiting for what was to come next. I am now at an age when I steadfastly try to ignore much of what lies in the future. I am stuck in the present and – increasingly so – the past. The future – although I would like to live as much of it as possible – is far too uncertain to consider. There is a certain comfort in the past: I know that I have survived it.
It is a simple fact that I have left far more time behind me than lays ahead, and what I have is passing with an unseemly haste. Time flies, but it is a twin-edged sword (courtesy of mixedmetaphores.com). I am a grandad and, eventually I might be a great-grandad. I do not want to be that old, but I do not want to miss out on whatever joy being that age might bring me. Making time for great-grandkids may not prove to be the easiest thing on earth – what with the carers to consider – but I’m definitely up for the chance to give it a go. Time might be ticking, but you can slow it down if you refuse to look…
Getting On 