Time

Officially time goes forward second by second, minute by minute and hour by hour. There are claims it differs in space and in vacuums, but I am only concerned about here on earth. We have all experienced the vagaries of time and how it moves in the real world. We have also found how the movement of time depends on location, problem, and the relationship with others and how their time flows.

Start with the alarm going off in the morning after your night in bed. How often did you check the time in the night, turn over for an hour and turn back to find five minutes had gone? This is, of course, altered if you have to get up early; then your night will involve five minutes stretching on and on as you keep staring at the clock.

Once the alarm goes off and you hit snooze, then time speeds up. However long you set it for, it will be 30 seconds between beeps. You will, of course, have your best sleep of the night for those 30 seconds though, and will find it hardest to wake up. The amount of time it takes to get through traffic to work is, of course, inversely proportional to the time you need. So if you leave 20 minutes early to beat the traffic you will take 30 minutes longer to get there. Though if you leave home 10 minutes late you will arrive at the same time as if you left early.

The time when the clock moves slowest is while working, while of course, it picks up speed as soon as you have a break. This also applies to weekends off, and holidays. A day off lasts roughly a quarter of the time as a day in work. Though, of course, if you stare out the window for a minute, day dream time has sneakily sped up and you have lost 20 minutes of your day and you're behind with your work. Time will notice and then speed up so you can never catch up, but you do go home sooner.

Once home from a time consumed day, it's time for a microwaved meal in front of the TV. Once you have worked out that 10 seconds more cooking is the difference between cold food and second-degree mouth burns, it's time for food in front of the box. Watching commercial TV, you have the adverts every few minutes in order to use the toilet or make a drink, but how long are the adverts going to be? If you sit there and put off drinks or loo break, they are five minutes of hard sell. If you decide that’s enough time the next time around then you go to make a drink, come back in two minutes and find you have missed half the show and the killer's already been arrested.

Obviously in order to calculate the time differences based on your situation and the interaction with others, you would need arms full of watches and a maths degree. For example, if you are just a couple of minutes late to meet your partner, why are you only a tiny bit late but they have been waiting ages. In theory, five past eight is five minutes late for both of you but not experienced the same by two different people.

There are many other factors to bear in mind, timetables for example. I have heard people complaining of missing trains because they left on time and that hadn’t happened before. This is another branch of time maths altogether. Included in this branch is the timetable at a London station which advertised three trains leave every hour, one every 23 minutes, yes you read that right and both happened.

Enjoy your time travels folks, Doctor Who has it easy compared with reality.