'Oh Time, Thou art too hard a knot for me to untie!' : How do you write up Time Passing? (A piece of life writing in a few jotted stanzas.)

‘O, Time, Thou art too hard a knot for me to untie!’ (Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare)

1.   Somehow, I always come back to Time: time passing, time holding you back, time tying you in knots. ‘O Time, thou art too hard a knot for me to untie!’ Viola. Twelfth Night. Time: how to manage it? There is so much of it infinitely folded away: so much and yet so little. I mean time passing moment to moment which is there even on the page. You lift and turn and the paper passes beneath you like a small wave. (I presume you are holding a book in your hand). A book comes to an end and if it is a good book (recently, Nevil Shute, Lonely Road, which took me quite by surprise because it is full of war time male action and aeroplanes) sometimes I can’t bear it; there is an aching feeling, it is grief, and I want it all to start again. Turn back I say, not with anger but with pleasure. Reading is a state of happiness if you can touch the bottom of the sea. Hold your breath, dive down, go under. How long can you last down there? I want it to last forever, the depth, the texture, the headiness of words passing me by leaving deposits, seaweed and wet pebbles. I mean real life passing as I imagine it, that’s what I want, so I return to play the scenes I will keep for memory, my found and familiar cinema-reels. Because we are all trying to regain moments spent elsewhere; to find something left behind -- a sandal, a bucket and spade, an engagement ring -- things carelessly spilt from fingers and hands as we chattered away distracted by the waves and the seagulls cawing above our heads. What messy creatures we say. See their deposits? We were on the beach, and it was hot and sunny and the white birds were above us screaming; and the ice cream van was ringing its bell; and there were donkeys carrying children up and down the dirty white sands. Why did we not notice then what we miss now? The blue-blue sky and the white foamy waves gently touching our toes? The donkeys braying.

2.   Those of us who feel our lives are running out – and isn’t that all of us, even children, who fear the end of the summer holidays, the end of Christmas, the end of their birthday, the end of themselves being important while the rest of us are waiting for such moments to be over, often so ghastly and filled with debris, never close enough to the pebbles, the beach, the foamy shore, the sea, our bare toes – can nowadays begin to make a new life on screen. It is ever so easy to start again. With a hint of persona and plenty of makeup, a confident mask, good lighting, and zoom, zoom. Home cinema is everywhere, and we all seem to make it, because it takes us back to moments of youth and vitality. Who are we kidding? Youth is the largest market of all; it sells everything, anything, you, me, them, all of us. Belly buttons on show, and shiny midriffs, flat flesh — youth is apparently very flat and rolled out thinly like pastry with a few pierced sprinkles on top — and there you have it: your favourite sugary topping. I was not this kind of youth, not the beach-bronzed ice cream eating sort. I was an unsettled teenager, I was not good at it, but I am good at being young, and I am good at being old. The two blend happily, and together we skip the light fantastic, while I ask my young self in the mirror, aren’t you glad that’s all over?

3. Youth is full of misery, doubt, uncertainty --- will he really meet me as he promised, will I really meet him? What if, what if, when, when ‘when’ never comes. Celia Johnson in that lovely film (it is lovely, and so is she, in a strange and yet ordinary sort of way; the strange is in her face – planetary, smooth craters, her cheeks, and her eyes — saucers of feelings running over; the ordinary is in her voice, so pleasing, so soothing, ‘have you had your tea yet, darling? I think it’s time the children went to bed.’) — that Celia knows youth is a mixed blessing, although it is hard to think of Celia as very young – she is so sensible, even around her lover — Alec —who she waits for on the corner of a provincial street, pacing, pacing, waiting for a peck on the cheek or an arm to take. Love there maybe, but no loving, it’s not allowed, theirs is a chaste relationship, a small slice of biography in the middle of a longer life --- perhaps halfway through her life, his too. Midway through life they tilt and hover. At some point in that film, Laura, the character (played by Celia), declares herself middle-aged. A most ambiguous era which for some of us never comes. We don’t allow it and it’s simply not in our DNA. Some of us are just young and old. It is possible to be betwixt and between the child who still wonders, what is this?

4. Middle age is having children old enough to be teenagers; it is having kitchen counters made messy by others; it is having exasperating phone calls with messy others – others who turn their back on you and never answer, not when you want them to —- others too busy, too busy to speak to you now they are detaching so rapidly (who are you kidding? When was the last time you had money in your purse?); it is other people’s lives starting; it is wondering about your own and where it is going. Down to the sea for me. I shall take a train and sit upon the promenade and watch the sun fold itself away. I have planned it all decidedly. There will be a bench just in the way and a café a short walk from me. There will be tea and iced buns and I will be too far from the station then to hear any bells or smell any smoke. And when I enter, there will be a cheery wave and a ‘Hello dearie, milk or plain?’ Then the woman in front of me will purse her lips and pass me a chocolate bar --- my reward, she tells me, for coming so far.

For Laetitia and Katherine and Alice and Becky and others I will not name. Reading Kin.