I never have time on my hands - or even on my wrist

May 14 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

"HAVE you got the time?" asked a man on the street before dashing haphazardly away like a bumblebee on speed.

It’s a funny expression. The one thing we don’t have in this life is time, but we keep on asking each other all the same.

We’re obsessed, in fact – perhaps because we never know how long we will go on for – dividing years into months, months into weeks and so on.

And, when we get to segments of time that are so small we can no longer perceive them, we invent new words like "millisecond" and "nanosecond" as if that will in some way help us to conquer them.

I read a novel once where a dying man asked to be moved into a different room of his house every day to make his final days appear longer, and it’s a strange paradox that, when you spend every day doing the same thing, the minutes drag but the weeks fly by.

I know this because I once worked in a department store and, for the first three weeks, I wasn’t trained to use the till so I was permanently stationed outside the fitting room.

Time has never passed so slowly. Whole galaxies were created from clouds of space dust, passed through their entire lifecycle and died in a spectacular range of colours in the time it took one customer to try on three shirts.

From my post between a table of crew-neck sweaters and the fitting room door, I watched small children grow several feet taller, develop acne, then wrinkles and finally shuffle out of the store as old men.

Or so it seemed.

Eventually I was forced to take action – I got rid of my watch.

To many people, this may seem to be a particularly drastic move, but I have a theory. Some people are watch people and some of us are not.

Some of us cannot survive without knowing exactly where the second hand is in relation to the big hand, or which numbers are lit up in the case of digital watches.

Then there are those who are able to amble calmly through life, taking each day as it comes and never raising their blood pressure.

By not wearing a watch, I am kidding myself that I belong to the latter group. I don’t, of course, although time did pass more quickly on the changing room door when I wasn’t consulting my Seiko every 10 seconds.

The act of not wearing a watch, when carried out by someone who, like myself, is a total slave to Father Time, is self-delusion.

My lack of timepiece is the equivalent of an accountant growing dreadlocks or a cheetah learning to samba.

Whether I am aware of the precise moment of the day or not, I cannot help but fill up every second with some pursuit or other – and if there’s a chance to multi-task I take it.

My problem is not time management, it’s that I take time management to an extreme – catching up on texts on the walk between the car park and work, whisking up fairy cake batter at the same time as cooking breakfast, studying for an MA while having a full-time job.

Not that I’m claiming to be original. This is modern life after all – multi-tasking is part of existence – and I don’t even have children to take up my time.

But it does worry me that, in the fable of the hare and the tortoise, I am the hare, rushing off in all directions while the tortoise is chilling out over a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.

Plus, in the animal kingdom, it seems to be the fast creatures that have the shortest life expectancies (five weeks for a worker bee) while the slowest live on and on (the Galapagos tortoise for more than 200 years), bringing some truth to the expression "live fast, die young".

So, May resolution: make like a tortoise. Or at least a half- tortoise, half- cheetah hybrid that gets everything done but also makes time for a nice cup of tea.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk