Basic HTML Version
June 2013 is the 25
th
anniversary of City & Village
Tours. For anyone as interested in the past as I am
twenty-five years is not very long, but of course,
time is relative. Twenty-five years is half my lifetime.
Albert Einstein once explained the principle behind
relativity in this accessible way:
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour,
it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove
for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour.
That’s relativity.”
So the anniversary has set me thinking about time but
not in the scientific sense - I’m with another Nobel
Prize winning physicist here, Richard Feynman, who
when asked about the science of time replied
‘Don't
even ask me. It's just too hard to think about.’
Time is
at once intimately familiar and yet deeply mysterious
to the great majority of us. It is fundamental to our
lives but, like electricity, we pay little heed to how it
works. We live our modern lives within a framework
of time but was it always so? Just when and how did
human beings start measuring and naming time?
When district surveyor Wally Webb retired in 1986,
(a decision made easy when Mrs. Thatcher abolished
his employer the old GLC), he took off his watch and
he hasn’t worn it since. I know that because I work
with his daughter Claire – she looks after the till here
at City & Village Tours: answers to the name Miss
Moneypenny. In removing his watch Wally was
symbolically setting himself free and in doing so he
was acknowledging something that people from many
different cultures have come to recognise – in the
words of an old Balkan proverb:
“A clock is a lock”.
The freedom of childhood has much to do with the
freedom from time. As a child I had but a faint grasp
of the passing of time and today a memory full of
endlessly long summer days. Logic dictates that a day
seems much longer to a seven-year old child because
it is 1/4000 of his life whereas to the 50 year old that
factor is down to
1/20,000. Children live in the day
with the changing seasons providing new theatrical
backdrops to their little stages. Shifting time in my
childhood was marked by the shoeboxes and potted
pastes of Harvest Festival followed by the clean crisp
smell of new school uniforms and the stink of the
turning leaves. It is said that as we grow beyond
childhood we leave behind a state of savagery and
become civilised. Is that it? Maybe time is not
intrinsic to human beings per se but to civilisation?
Packed Lunches & Circadian Oscillators
To see if animals have much sense of time, monkeys
were given the choice of one or two bananas. Without
fail they chose two but as the numbers got higher so
their choices became more random. The monkeys
failed to show signs of planning for the future:
offered five or ten bananas half the time they
responded only to their immediate hunger choosing
five bananas. A similar result was seen with rats and
pigeons and it is thought that even hoarders like
Time Flies & We’re Still Having Fun