The late, great Matt McGinn once penned a song acknowledging that no matter how good or bad things seem, time is a constant reminder of life's inherent fragility and fleeting nature.
And never are you reminded of how quickly and incessantly time ticks away than on a Friday, since it's far and away the best day in the week.
Friday - and Friday night in particular - just feels different somehow, always seems to be full of possibilities, always has a better vibe. Even at times when I haven't been working a regular 9-5 Monday-Friday job, even when I haven't been working at all, I've always looked forward to Friday with eagerness and optimistic expectation. It's just different.
Even entrepreneurs have got in on the act, opening up Friday-themed restaurants where fairly ordinary tucker is served up amidst an atmosphere of contrived bonhomie by irritatingly whacky, zany staff. Strangely enough, no smartarse businessman has ever thought of opening up a similar establishment of fun call Aw Naw, It's Sunday.
At this establishement the bill of fare is take-it-or-leave-it rubbery roast chicken with exhausted vegetables and the waiters are middle-aged blokes in Lyle and Scott sweaters and Hush Puppies who tell interminable stories about British A roads and their wife's quilting exploits, prior to a protracted screening of their unedited holiday home movies.
Sundays are definitely depressing. They always have been, but they used to be much worse.
Way back when, in the days before the pubs could open, a Sunday afternoon was the perfect example of the relative nature of time's dimension.
If you weren't there - but especially if you were - I can provide four words that instantly sum up the perpetual and seemingly infinite nature of a Sunday afternoon back in the sixties and seventies: Two Way Family Favourites.
And, if by some chance, you retained the will to live after a few hours of Cliff Mitchelmore, Vera Lynn and Sparky and his magic piano, the coup de grace of tedium was well and truly delivered by the delights of Stars on Sunday. Jess Yates at his organ and Harry Seacombe in a horrible anorak belting out Bless this House - just kill me now, will you? And then you had school the next day, with not a thing to look forward to for five whole days.
Ah, school. Double algebra on a Monday morning. Those wonderful memories.
Willing the clock on the wall to move around faster, hoping for some small incident that might lessen the boredom, such as Mad Alex the maths teacher having one of his celebrated 'bennies' resulting in an indiscriminate belting for some poor pupil. Not a lot of fun if it was you but it least it gave the morning a slightly more animated twist.
But not these days. How times change.
These days, it seems that no matter what I'm doing, no matter how routine or humdrum my activity, time seems to shoot by as fast as Usain Bolt - or for lovers of nostalgic Scottish sporting moments Allan Wells, with his wife Margo screaming blue murder at him, as seen at the Moscow Olympics in 1980.
Apparently this is a logical consequence of getting older. When you're 10, a year, being a tenth of your life, is a significant portion of time. At 50 it's merely a 50th and is therefore smaller and significantly less significant, if you know what I mean.
Whatever the logic, the fact remains that time rarely drags for me nowadays. Even boring stuff whizzes by; Sunday afternoons are a mere blur, though that might well be as a result of spending them in the pub.
And as for Friday nights? Well, it's like they're played in constant fast forward; all time seems to go quickly but Fridays go quicker than ever, the hours between 7am and 11pm in particular zooming past like Usain Bolt with Allan Wells getting a hudgie on his back whilst Margo chases them both with a rolling pin.
The question is, however, how can we slow time down? Is it possible to conserve it in order to help us enjoy the good times more?
Obviously we wouldn't want to do it with all the crappy things we do - they can go even faster if they like. It could be a kind of trade off - mathematics, lawn bowls and televised golf at double speed, drinking and carousing in slow motion.
Drugs might help. I'm thinking specifically of beta-blockers, which were very popular in the eighties, particularly for snooker players, since it seemed they slowed down the heartbeat or something, making that difficult kiss off the pink a dawdle for the likes of Steve 'Interesting' Davis, Cliff 'Somewhat Less Interesting' Thorburn and Stephen 'Not Even Marginally Interesting' Hendry.
I'm not altogether sure about how, but I'm pretty sure it works, even for spectators, since a snooker game always seemed to me to last a lifetime, or at any rate the average lifetime of a small marsupial.
Not all of the snooker players went for beta-blockers of course - who could forget big Bill Werbeniuk, the fella who once managed to con a doctor into giving him a medical line for a daily prescription of 12 pints of lager. This unusual treatment seemed to work for Bill as far as slowing down time is concerned - I checked on Wikipedia and it seems the big bloke has successfully managed to arrest the inevitable passage of time in one fell swoop.
He died in 2003.
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