Just Finished Reading: Timekeepers – How the World Became Obsessed with Time by Simon Garfield (FP: 2016)

I pretty much knew that I’d enjoy this rather wide-ranging and eclectic book when I read this in the blurb on the back: Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana. With an author with a sense of humour that much out of whack I just knew that I’d be chuckling over this book for days and I was – and, even more importantly, I learnt stuff too.

Some of which, being the reader I am, I knew or had heard about elsewhere. Like the fact that, before the rise of the railways (or more important railway timetables) that most places operated on local time rather than any agreed time zone. So it could by 10:15 in London and 10:21 in Bristol at the same time in relation to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). With the proliferation of time tables and the inherent danger of two trains operating on different times meeting each other local time just had to stop (although it didn’t go down without a fight – but then neither did the switchover from the Julian to Gregorian calendar). Ever wondered why a single was around 3 minutes and a Cd started out at around 76 minutes? Ever wonder why a music album is called that? You’ll find out here (hint: it’s a mixture of technology and the love of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony). Why is Switzerland the home of time? What makes that place so special in the hearts of horologists that they’d spend thousands, tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on a watch actually less accurate than a $50 quartz watch powered by battery? Why did it take so long to break the 4 minute mile and once broke why was it broken time and time again shortly after? How did Roger Bannister cope with having to relive those 4 minutes over and over again for the rest of his life (despite being an accomplished and published medical practitioner). Being in the right place at the right time can change your life – and get you a Pulitzer Prize for photography. Having film in the camera ready to go and seeing something unfold in front of you helps too as several photographers found out in Vietnam. But being in the right place is nothing compared to having what you need, where you need it, just when you need it. After all time is money especially when time is in motion – like on a production line. Sure doing to same thing over and over again, timed down to the second, kills your soul but just think of how many widgets will roll off the line every hour of every day. Not forgetting just how much time you can save if you just had the right time management programme. There’s certainly enough experts out there with their own world beating system to shave off those seconds and allow you to cram in even more to our ever accelerating lives (oh, how I hate this idea!) but what if we could turn the world on its head and actually slow things down, with slow food, slow towns, slow lanes and (hopefully) sloe gin.

I could go on but who has the time? This book was, as I rightly suspected, a delight from beginning to end (OK, there was a bit over half way that I struggled with for a time about the passion of owning wristwatches but I did find myself wondering if I should go for an upgrade to something a little smarter – rather than my usual supermarket throwaway versions) full of interesting stories and strange people obsessed with their own piece of time (how about a 10 hour day each of 100 minutes, 10 days in a week and 10 months in a year). If nothing else this book clearly demonstrates, time and again, that we humans have a very strange relationship with time which goes far beyond the rational or, frankly, sane thinking that you’d hope to find with something as predictable and as regular as the ticking of a clock. Recommended if you’ve ever wondered about time and where it goes when you’re not looking – in this case between the pages of a book well worth the time to read it.