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Chapter One

The Accident of Time

i) Leaving the Ground

You know that thing they say about comedy being tragedy plus time? The thinking is that any terrible misfortune can be made hilarious given a suitable period to recover and reassess the situation. The film director Mel Brooks (who found that the passage of time permitted him to make fun of Hitler in The Producers) had his own version: ‘Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.’

*

We had been to a football match. After three minutes of extra time, my son Jake and I untied our bikes from the railings and cycled towards Hyde Park. Chelsea’s opening game of the season had been an easy thing, 2–0 over Leicester, goals from Costa and Hazard, and we’d enjoyed being back at the ground after the summer layoff. The cycle home was good too: late August sun, the park packed with tourists.

The day was dominated by a fixture list that had appeared two months before, and the kick-off time was dictated about a month after that by the television companies. But when the day of the match finally came it was all about old rituals: when to meet up, when to have lunch, how long the pizzas take, how long until the bill arrives, the walk to the ground, the length of the turnstile queue, the songs on the PA before the game – always Blur’s ‘Parklife’ these days, coordinated with the big-screen video of past glories. And then the game itself: how slow it seems when you’re winning and waiting for the final whistle, and how quickly it goes when you’re behind.

We left a minute early to avoid the crowds, also a temporal negotiation: how does one measure the possibility of missing a last-minute goal with the value one attaches to saving ten minutes of crowd congestion? Many in the crowd chose the early departure, which almost defeated the object, and we weaved our bikes through the throngs on the Fulham Road. My youngest son Jake was 24, full of energy, slightly ahead of me along Exhibition Road and past the Albert Hall. The nice thing about Hyde Park is the modern division of the pavement, half for cyclists, half for pedestrians, and you glide past the Serpentine Gallery, a show by an artist I’d never heard of, and then suddenly I had blood pouring from my face, a pulsing gash just above my eye, my sunglasses smashed, my bike in the road, a heavy numb pain around my right elbow, a lot of concerned people, the sort of frowns on their faces that suggested to me that my head wound must be serious. Someone was calling an ambulance and another was giving me paper towels to clutch to my head, and the towels were turning crimson.

It was just as people had said: time did indeed seem to slow down. I can see the fall not exactly in slow motion but extended, each tiny event surrounding the accident elongated and logged as if it might be my last, my flight from bike to ground an elegant swoop through the air rather than an ungainly, panicky confusion, people saying ‘ambulance’ all the time. The ambulance arrived in six long minutes or so, probably finding it hard to work itself past all the supporters, and I can remember being worried about my bike, and who would tell my wife. One of the ambulance men cut open the sleeve of my jacket and flinched a little as he saw the state of my elbow. No bones exposed, but swelling like a dinner plate, and he said, ‘You’ll have that X-rayed, but I can tell you now that it’s broken!!’, and we sped on to the hospital on the Fulham Road we had passed not fifteen minutes earlier. I asked him if they were going to put the sirens on, and he asked me what had happened.

I had been undone by time. I wasn’t going fast, because the pavement was crowded. Jake was ahead of me, and there were a lot of people on our left up ahead, and one of them, a visitor from Portugal we find out later, drifted out slightly from her friends, and walked directly into my path. I knew I was going to hit her before I did, but there was no time to brake or even put my hand out, and my bike seemed to disappear underneath me as I fell forward. The Portuguese woman, perhaps mid-20s, was shocked and concerned, and Jake took her mobile number, but we have no idea where that is now. Even at the time, sitting on the grass near the Serpentine Gallery, I think I knew it could have been much worse, and my sunglasses could have shattered into my eyes, and I would have lost my sight.

Neuroscientists may be a little worn out with the amount of stories they hear of time slowing down at the scene of an accident, and they will tell you why it seems that way. Accidents are alarming and fearful things. For those tumbling over a bike or a precipice, our brain finds plenty of space for new memories to imprint themselves upon our cortex. We remember them as significant events with lots of vivid action, and when we reframe that narrative in our own heads, or tell it to others, there appears to be so much going on that it simply must have taken longer than the split second it actually did. Compared to familiar occurrences that have hardened in our cortex until we no longer have to think about them (the drive to the shops with our mind on other matters, the routines so familiar we say we can do them in our sleep), a sudden new event will require more of our brain’s attention. The unfamiliar shape of a woman as she crosses a painted white line, the loose chips of gravel, the shrieks of brakes and passers-by – these are unusual things to process when one is trying to limit the damage to vulnerable flesh.

But what actually happens in this flashbulb moment? How does a flashbulb moment seem to collide with a long exposure, something that we know to be impossible? Two small portions of our brain known as the amygdalae – groups of hyper-responsive nerve bundles in the temporal lobe concerned primarily with memory and decision-making – commandeer the rest of the brain’s functions to react in a crisis. It is something that seems to stretch a one-second fall to five seconds or more, set off by fear and sudden shocks that hit our limbic system so hard that we may never forget them. But our perceived duration distortion is just that; clock time has not in fact offered to pause or elongate for us. Instead, the amygdalae have laid down memories with far more vivid detail, and the time distortion we perceive has just happened in retrospect. The neuroscientist David Eagleman, who has conducted many experiments into time perception and as a boy experienced a similar elongation of time when he fell off a roof, explains it in terms of ‘a trick of the memory writing a story of a reality’. Our neural mechanisms are constantly attempting to calibrate the world around us into an accessible narrative in as little time as possible. Authors attempt to do the same, for what is fiction if not time repositioned, and what is history if not time in retrospect, events re-evaluated in our own time?

Not that I could have explained this in the ambulance on the way to the hospital; the ambulance had its own routines and schedules. As did A & E, where I sat for what seemed like an eternity waiting to be seen. With my amygdalae returned to equilibrium, there was now a different sort of elongated time – the elongation of boredom, two hours or so looking at other patients and wondering how I would cancel most of my packed week ahead. Jake had planned to take the last train that evening to St Ives, but the train would leave without him. After a while my wife Justine arrived, and I took her through what happened, still with bloody paper stuck above my eye, and after a further while the process began properly, and I was on a gurney in a screened cubicle, a nurse seeing whether I could make a fist. It was almost midnight when they started putting my elbow in plaster to keep it from moving before they could operate on it, and past one by the time a kind doctor at the end of his shift said he had to get back to his wife and their three-week-old baby, but he would sew me up rather than let a junior do it because it was such a deep wound.

And then at around 3 a.m. I was alone in the bowels of the Chelsea and Westminster. My wife and son had driven home with the bikes in the back of the car, and I didn’t yet have a bed in a ward so I lay in a darkened room in a speckled gown tied at the back, with my arm in plaster on my chest and nine stitches just above my eyebrow, and painkillers inside me. I wondered how long I would be there, and how long until they operated, and I could hear dripping somewhere and a person calling outside my room, and I began to feel cold.

I thought I could feel every granule of time. It was August 2014, but the date seemed irrelevant and arbitrary. My over-wound mind had been prised open by a fall, and everything had been upended. In a dead space in a clinical setting I felt myself drifting towards a consciousness where time took on not only a new urgency, but also a new laxity. I was back in a cradle where time was no longer my own, and it made me question to what extent it ever had been. Was everything chance or was everything fixed? Had we lost control of something we had created? If we’d left the ground just a half-minute earlier, or pedalled just that bit harder, one wheel rotation more, or if the traffic lights by the Royal Albert Hall had slowed us down, and if the woman from Portugal had lingered over her cake that afternoon, or, even better, hadn’t come to London at all, then this would have never happened, and Jake would have caught his train, and I would have watched the highlights on Match of the Day, and the doctor would have arrived home earlier to help his wife. Everything that passed for time in this setting had been self-imposed and self-ordained, a modern arrangement calibrated gradually over generations. It made me wonder how such an alliance had come about. Time regulated transport, entertainment, sport, medical diagnostics, everything – and the people and processes that set these connections in motion are the subject of this book.

ii) The Shortness of Life and How to Live It

Someone feeling sorry for themselves in a hospital ward today would do well to think of Seneca 2,000 years ago. On the Shortness of Life advised his readers to live life wisely, which is to say not frivolously. He looked around and didn’t like the way people were spending their time, the way ‘one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth.’ Most existence, he reasoned, was not life, not living, ‘but merely time’. In his mid-60s, Seneca took his own life by slitting his wrists in the bath.

The most famous line in Seneca’s essay comes right at the start, a reminder of a famous saying by the Greek physician Hippocrates: ‘Life is short, art is long.’ The exact meaning of this is still open to interpretation (he was probably not referring to the queues at the hot Richter show, but the length of time it takes to become an expert at something), and Seneca’s employment of the phrase confirms that the nature of time was a topic that thinkers in Ancient Greece and Rome found highly engaging. Around 350 bc, Aristotle saw time as a form of order rather than measure, an arrangement in which all things are related to each other. He saw the present not as fixed, but as a moving entity, a component of continuous change, ever dependent on the past and the future (and, idiosyncratically, the soul). Around ad 160 Marcus Aurelius believed in fluidity: ‘Time is a river of passing events and as strong as its current’ he found. ‘No sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept aside and another takes its place. This too will be swept away.’ Saint Augustine of Hippo, who lived a long life between 354 and 430, caught the fleeting essence of time that has confounded quantum physicists ever since: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’

My elbow was made in the summer of 1959, and it had been shattered on its 55th anniversary. The X-rays showed it now resembled a puzzle, with the bones of my joint chipped and scattered like fleeing prisoners. During my forthcoming operation, which I was assured would be fairly routine, the bits would have to be rounded up and held in place by pieces of wire.

The watch I was wearing at the time of the accident was also made in the 1950s, and lost between four and ten minutes a day, depending on how often I wound it, and other things. I liked the fact that it was old (you can trust an old watch because it’s been doing the same thing for years). To be punctual at appointments I had to calculate exactly how late my watch may be. I had been meaning to take it in for recalibration, but I never seemed to have the time. Most of all I enjoyed the analogue factor, the cogs and springs and flywheels that didn’t need a battery. But what I really liked was the suggestion that time shouldn’t control how I conducted my life. Time could be the most destructive force, and if one could protect oneself from its ravages, one could somehow attain a sense of control, and a sense of directing one’s own destiny, at least on an hourly basis. The best thing of all, of course, the ultimate temporal freedom, would be to give my watch away, or to throw it from the window of a speeding train.

Four minutes of time, fast or slow – that was a useful thing to consider when lying supine and semi-conscious in a dark room, drifting in a boat along the reeds, searching for the place, in a phrase Clive James once employed in a song, where you trade your shells for feathers. I admired the optimism of Aristotle: ‘We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs.’ I wanted a time holiday; I approved of J.B. Priestley’s dictum that a good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than one’s own.

They operated on me the next morning, and not long after lunchtime my mouth was dry and there was a surgeon standing over me and a nurse was measuring the throbs of my heart. The procedure had gone well, and I could expect to get about 90 per cent of my flexibility and pronation back within eight weeks if I worked hard at the physiotherapy.

In between the physio I watched a lot more television than normal, and got far angrier than usual, and read a lot on my Kindle, normal books being unmanageable with just one good hand, as was watch-winding. I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that inflated spiritual road trip by Robert M. Pirsig that became a phenomenal bestseller by tapping into some sort of Western cultural zeitgeist, or what the Swedes call a kulturbärer, an ultra-timely book that challenged our assumptions about cultural values. In this case, Zen challenged our assumptions that what we wanted was more and faster – more materialism, a faster and more connected life, a greater reliance on things beyond our control or understanding.

Beneath the surface, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is all about time. It begins with the words ‘I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning’, and for the next 400 pages the grip barely loosens – the exploration of what one values and treasures in life, and what one sees and feels at the core of the journey. The bike ride through a scorching landscape lends it an immediate consciousness. The riders – the writer, his son Chris and some friends – are heading through the Central Plains to Montana and beyond, and they are not dawdling. ‘We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.’

I thought about the man who had turned me on to books and words, a school English teacher named John Couper. Mr Couper let me bring the lyrics of Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ into our A-level seminar and analyse it like it was a Shelley poem, even though it was obviously much better. One day, Couper had stood up at the podium in our Great Hall during morning assembly and delivered a speech about time. I think he began with some famous time quotes: ‘Time spent laughing is time spent with the Gods’ (anonymous); ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life’ (Socrates). He then read from a list, and I remember it like this: ‘Time. You can spend it, make it, lose it, save it, squander it, slow it down, speed it up, beat it, keep it, master it, spare it, kill it.’ There were other dainty uses too, but his big final message was that we were privileged to be young and have time on our side, for time waits for no man (it was an all-boys school then) and that whatever else we did with our time, we shouldn’t waste it. That stuck with me, but it was a hard rule to live by.

Sometimes I think I can measure out my childhood with images of timekeeping. Perhaps we all can. One day when I was three or four my father brought home a gold carriage clock in a case lined with crimson crushed velvet, and when my tiny finger pressed the button at the top a bell chimed the hours. The school clock in the Great Hall, the kitchen clock, and in my bedroom I had an alarm clock called Big Ben made by Westclox.¹

Then one day we turned on the television to watch the Irish comedian Dave Allen. This was as risky as it got in my house: Allen was a ‘dangerous’ comedian, often outraging religious groups, drinking and smoking on air, stretching out stories well beyond bedtime. He looked a little louche, and had lost the tip of his left forefinger in what he claimed was a spooky comic accident, but we found out later that it happened when a cog chewed it in a mill when he was six.

One night he got off his tall chair, put down his cut-glass tumbler, and started one of his stories about the peculiar way we order our lives. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘how we live by time . . . how we live by the watch, the clock. We’re brought up to the clock, we’re brought up to respect the clock, admire the clock. Punctuality. We live our life to the clock.’ Allen waved his right arm around in astonishment at the craziness of it all. ‘You clock in to the clock. You clock out to the clock. You come home to the clock. You eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock . . . You do that for forty years of your life, you retire, what do they fucking give you? A clock!’

His swearing triggered lots of phone calls from viewers (there were people who were just poised by their phones when Allen was on, like contestants on a quiz show). But no one quickly forgot the joke, nor the perfect comic timing, every pause like the air in a drum solo.

Recovering, I wasted a lot of time on my iPhone. One night as I lay in bed I had an urgent need to watch films starring Bill Nighy. I dimmed the screen on my phone and feasted on YouTube, and was watching addictive flows of Richard Curtis movies and David Hare’s play Skylight, and when I was done I did something unforgivable: I paid to download About Time. It was a preposterous thing about how the men in the fictional Nighy family can travel back in time, correct the mistakes of the past – a wrong word here, a bungled meeting there – and end up happy in love. As the film critic Anthony Lane pointed out, the really smart thing to do would be to look at the day’s papers and travel back to bet on winning horses, Back to the Future-style, but, as has been clear for over a century of such fictional wanderings, time travel is seldom practised by the most astute. Obviously I wished I could have travelled back and not clicked Purchase.

But it wasn’t just his work that drew me to Nighy. I once had dinner with him and his then-wife Diana Quick, and found him to be exactly the same as he was in most of his movies and plays: the immaculate suit and heavy glasses, of course, and the impeccable debonair English manners and chivalry that makes you believe everything he says is either knowing or hilarious. What I really liked about him was that he seemed to have his life mapped out perfectly. When asked how he spent his spare time he said he watched a lot of football on television, particularly Champions League games. He was just fascinated by the Champions League. In fact, he said, he measured out his remaining time on earth by how many Champions League seasons he had left. If FC Barcelona could entertain an elegant but exhausted soul for the next 25 years with their swift passing style and a strict dressing-room edict that they were to hold the ball for no longer than seven seconds, then that would amount to a fantastic mortal span for him.

As I recovered from my accident, and my elbow healed, and I was able to hold a book again, I discerned an exploration of time in almost everything I encountered: every story, every book. And every film too: every plot was time-sensitive or time-dependent, and everything that wasn’t set in an imaginary time was history. In the newspapers and on television, little seemed to be worth covering unless it was linked to an anniversary.

And the word dominated. Every three months, the Oxford English Dictionary adds about 2,500 new and revised words and phrases to the online version of its third edition (in print, the second edition runs to 20 volumes, containing 615,000 entries). Many of the new words are slang, and many of the others derive from popular culture or digital tech. In contrast to the new words, the OED also maintains a list of the old words we use most often, and they are words we might expect: the, be, to, of and, of course, and. But what are the most commonly used nouns? Month is at number 40. Life is number 9. Day is 5, and Year is 3. Person is at number 2, while the most commonly used noun in the English language is time.²

The OED observes that our lexicon relies on time not merely as a single word, but as a philosophy: more actions and phrases depend on time than any other. On time, last time, fine time, fast time, recovery time, reading time, all-time. The list goes on for ages. It leaves us in no doubt of time’s unassailable presence in our lives. And reading just the beginning of that list might lead one to imagine we have come too far, and are travelling too fast, to reinvent time or stop it altogether. But as we shall see in the next chapter, we once had a notion that such things were both possible and desirable.

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1 Which reminded me of that joke where Big Ben talks to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and says, ‘I’ve got the time if you’ve got the inclination.’

2 Oxford University Press conducted its research online, consulting books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and Hansard.

Counter-revolutionary: the 10-hour clock finds a new admirer.