The Time of Your Life

It's funny, don't you think, how a minute can sometimes seem like a long time; yet in other circumstances a minute can seem like nothing at all. I was only reflecting on this paradox earlier today when I was re-heating a cup of tea in my (rather noisy) microwave whilst trying to listen to somebody talking on the radio about something important. I was straining to hear the weighty words, but was finding it difficult – drowned out as the words were by the grinding, whirring and humming of the heating machine. I'd only set the damned thing for sixty seconds, but as the speaker's words were slipping forever into the eddy of obscurity, those short sixty seconds seem to be dragging themselves along as if anchored to the dawn of time which, for some reason, wouldn't let them go.

This was hardly an original observation, but when I looked further for the real reason why time is (for us all) relative, I began to recognize that it's probably to do with our own state of mind. Today, I was irritated with the microwave and wanted it to stop. The fact that it didn't cease its grumbling rumble when I required it to do so, was not the machine's fault. It was simply obeying the instructions that I - now the irrationally irritated one - had issued. So really, I was irritated with myself and because of that, felt that time was playing a trick on me. Which of course, it wasn't. Time isn't relative at all (in fact, time probably doesn't exist – despite David Bowie once singing that "Time flexes like a whore; falls wanking to the floor.." etc). No, it is our application of time that is relative, that's all.

Once the microwave had stopped turning, I caught the rather breezy young reporter cheerfully asking her interviewee: "So, you then went on to become a crack-cocaine addict?" She asked the question in the same tone as she might have asked: "So, you then went on to study the History of Art at Oxford?" It sounded like the sort of question the guests are asked on Desert Island Discs (it wasn't, by the way). I can just imagine Kirsty Young interviewing Adolf Hitler and saying: "So, you put the painting to one side, and then went on to become a mass murderer? Your next choice of music, please."

Oh goodness, I must stop prattling on – look at the time!