So today youngest asked me to time her running around some obstacle course she had devised in one of our local haunts. Being the troglodyte that I am, and forgetting that my phone has a timer, I turned to my (analogue) watch to use the second hand. Bizarrely and presumably due to some battery issue (I am not so technologically challenged that I need to wind my watch) the second hand was jumping round in four second intervals.

This not only prompted me to find the aforementioned mobile phone timer but also made me think about the nature of time itself.

It’s a well known phenomenon that time appears to accelerate as we get older. Certainly as I sit here on a beautiful mid to late April evening it is hard to remember where January and it’s subsequent friends went.

But, and here is the rub, our holiday last October in Florida seems a whole lifetime ago and yet when my piano tuner recently called to book his six monthly appointment I could swear he was only here last week. You see? Elastic…

We can all remember the long empty summers of our childhood’s. Day after day of hot sun, taking honey sandwiches up to the bypass embankment (that is probably just me and my brother) and playing in the street until dusk. The next school year apparently an eon away with each yawning day waiting to be filled with adventures, some reluctantly undertaken chores and quite a lot of boredom.

So why now do the kids’ school holidays appear to rush by in a whirlwind?

When I was first at home with my eldest as a baby time seemed to creep by. I remember hours of walking round my village with just my thoughts and a really fairly unresponsive son for company. I remember on one such walk calculating the number of days I would need to fill before he started school (that Maths thing again). And I used to impatiently watch the clock tick round to the home coming of my husband, and the chance for someone to talk to.

Yet now I look at that same son, strapping at 11, and wonder where all that time went.

WordPress has decided to post this prematurely (technology, pah) and so my time is up. I need to edit this quickly before anyone finds it incomplete.

And I guess it is an apt metaphor. Life is busy, full of pressures and deadlines and so time slips away. Sometimes the boredom and slowness of those earlier periods seems like the halcyon days. Life is a rollercoaster you can’t get off with all too few slow trundles up hill.

Its hard to take the time to appreciate it all as the world whips by… in four second intervals…