Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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      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. СКАЧАТЬ