After All This Time
After All This Time
Have you noticed how, on cold but crisp autumn mornings, if you stare at the low sun and scrunch-up your eyes you can make it look as if there’s mist laying low over the land? Yet if it is a truly misty start to the day, no matter how wide you open your eyes, the mist never goes away. Why is that? Surely logic would suggest taking an opposite action should generate an opposite reaction. Isn’t that Einstein? Or perhaps a case of ‘some you lose, and some you lose’? I don’t know. It just strikes me as odd, unbalanced, out of whack. But then lots of things do I suppose, if you take the time and trouble to think about them. Having said that - and have you noticed how, as soon as you say one thing, another immediately pops into your head, often to baldly contradict what you had previously thought, as if there is a part of you determined to undermine yourself, to always dispute and ridicule, to disprove what you say and think and believe so that you don’t actually know what’s right any more? Anyway, having said all that about taking the time and trouble etcetera, most people don’t have any spare, do they? Time, I mean, not trouble. Certainly not enough sloshing around for them to be squinting up at the sky. They’ve got more important things to do, deadlines to meet, trains to catch, mouths to feed, bucks to earn, clothes to buy, drinks to drink, dogs to walk… And not doing things takes time as well because we have to think about those too, deciding not to do them, working out avoidance strategies or alternatives. “If it’s not one thing it’s another” as my old grandmother said. Or may have said. An approximation at least. Not that she has to worry about whether or not there is morning mist any more, nor the chasing of buses or boiling of potatoes. Unless there’s an afterlife and it looks very much like this one. Which would seem a cruel twist, wouldn’t it? I mean, “out of the frying pan and into the fire”. That could have been another one of hers, couldn’t it? If you had known her you would be able to make your own mind up; but as you didn’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it. But an afterlife like this one? And what would come after that? Where would it end? We could be worrying about some kind of heaven-or-hell scenario without realising that we were already living in perpetual purgatory. Some joke that would be. And I wonder what might be different, one world to the next, if anything. Like that thing about mist and eyes. Would there be a world where, when you did open your eyes wide, the mist would actually disappear? Or one where there was no Einstein, or the rules of the universe were altered in some way, or the number twenty-four bus always ran on time? You might want to argue at least one of those is too fanciful. But I do have the time, just at the minute. Well, for much longer than a minute, obviously. The opportunity to contemplate things because I have no cakes to bake nor trains to catch. I’d like to take the credit for being in such an enviable position, I really would. And I may do yet; you know, find a way to harvest kudos for my situation, my freedom. It seems only right and proper that I should; entirely logical in fact. Why should Benson take any of the credit? All he did was to fire me; I was the one who got into the position where I could be fired. Doesn’t that make it all my own doing? Doesn’t that make Benson something of a puppet of mine, playing the part I had assigned him, merely executing his role based on the situation in which I had placed him? One might even say ‘lovingly crafted’. Not that I loved him, of course. Not in any incarnation of the word. He was a little man in all senses: stature, philosophy, fellow-feeling, intelligence, imagination. Had he been born many years earlier I’m sure he would have been a pen-pusher. Literally. And perhaps he had been in one of his previous purgatorial lives. It would have been fitting; a part he hadn’t even needed to audition for. There are lots of people like that, aren’t there? Those who seem to fit the niche they occupy, round peg etcetera. But surely that can’t occur simply by luck. “Oh, here’s a hole and I fit it perfectly!” Surely people have to whittle away - either at the hole or at themselves - to become even remotely comfortable. Which is something I have never found myself needing to do, hence, in spite of what I just said, there was still a little surprise in that final confrontation with Benson when he confessed he had to “let me go” - which, to be honest, sounded like a rather generous and most un-Benson-like thing to do. To be let go, to be freed. If you think about it, that’s almost beatific, god-like. Which certainly isn’t Benson, and therefore all the credit must be mine. Surely. But time - which is the ultimate gift of freedom, isn’t it? - can be a tricky bugger. It’s as if someone might turn round out of the blue and give you a lifetime’s supply of your favourite sweets or cakes. I mean, I like a chocolate eclair as much as the next man, but if you had a never-ending supply of the bloody things, well… You’d go off them wouldn’t you? They’d cease to be your secret little treat and become something else; mundane, normal. They’d go from special to not-special, just like that. And freedom and time is a little bit like that. Now I have a fridge full of time and I don’t know what to do with it. Remember weekends that were magical, or that short holiday you took to Belgium or wherever? How much were they elevated from the mundane because you had to steal time in order to make them happen? ‘Steal’. That’s my word. You’d try and eke out as much as you could from every last hour or minute to make the most of things; you’d cram in one more museum or garden or ancient monument because you had too. Because time demanded it of you. “Fill me up!” it begged; “Use me, use me!” And you did, and it was great - maybe not at the time, but looking back later, utilising smaller pockets of time in remembering the larger ones. Sitting on the sofa drinking coffee after dinner: “Remember that weekend we had in Tuscany…” It's as if the experience has become doubly special: special at the time, and then special again in its recall. Like the payback on an investment - and one that keeps giving. But now, in my post-Benson world, there is no special time because I have it all. No looking forward to weekends because they mean I won’t be working; Saturday and Sunday might just as well be relabelled Monday for all the difference they now make. Indeed, why not go the whole hog and call every day Monday or Wednesday (not that I ever liked the word ‘Wednesday’, you understand). Not one minute is ‘outstanding’ - at least in the sense of spending time, if I may be tantalisingly philosophical.