2 – Without looking at your watch: what time is it?

I can hear the church bells ringing with the midday persistence, that seems to insist a bit too strongly that churches still matter. That it is midday comes as a surprise to me - I thought vaguely in a far-off way that it was still mid-morning. Such are the joys of holidays and rising late.

As time goes on and a greater portion of my life by gradual accumulation has been turned over to work I find in moments like these, when the rest of the world is working and I am not, that I can gain a mysteriously deep satisfaction from reflecting on my own inactivity.

Deep it is, but alas also fleeting. The runaway feeling of wasted hours pulls me further from it. The vast cold relentless ebb of time. The unstoppable tsunami surge of it that mixes everything up, extinguishes all brief candle flames of satisfaction that gave not warmth, but the sustaining idea of warmth. Forced to cling to what we can for as long as we can before it is torn from us. Where every pause and moment of respite is some dark sucking eddy swirled with debris as the rest of the world tears past in a silent meaningless procession, headed by a telegraph pole, a car, a sign, empty boxes, a shoal of fruit, a jacket.

Without looking at my watch I know that it is too late, too early, too soon, gone already, the unalterable past, the unavoidable future, the mesmerising distracting glitter and panic of the present.