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 Passing the time



Funny stuff time, goes faster when we’re enjoying ourselves, slower when we’re not. We measure its passage using atoms, divide it into fractions of a second when the Stig does a lap on Top Gear are paid for ours hourly, and probably poorly, and if that wasn’t enough – there’s never enough of it. The image above is of a slice of time 1 – 320th of a second thick digitally frozen, launched into cyberspace, to be reproduced, around the globe, in bytes of time even thinner than 1 – 320th of a second.

Draft saved at 1:55:48 I’ve just been advised. Do I need such levels of time accuracy when typing an essay?  Trains run on time, to a timetable,  though sometimes they do neither and ‘on time’ can mean anything up to ten minutes after the time advertised as being the time of arrival – what Alice in Wonderland would have made of that only the Mad Hatter could tell.

There’s a great deal about the modern railway which only someone as mad as a hatter could tell – my last journey by rail went like this. Catch train in Leeds to York, catch train in York, which had come from Leeds, empty. Things are going along quite nicely when, approaching Newcastle, the Tannoy announced we would be calling next at Newcastle and then Carlisle, I was travelling to Dundee. Work, it appeared, was being carried out on the East Coast Mainline at Berwick upon Tweed and as all other possible diversionary routes had been chopped by Beeching’s axe we had to go from Newcastle to Carlisle and then via Carstairs to Edinburgh to get back on track!! Well, it passed on an hour or two on, if nothing else.

The photograph shows ‘Derby 4’ No.43924 piloting Bulleid Pacific No. 34092 Wells in ‘topfield’ between Haworth and Oxenhope on the K&WVR

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