TWO news stories got me thinking this week about the nature of ... time. If you can spare a minute, I’ll tell you about it.

First, there were the Finns. Their relatively young prime minister, Sanna Marin, aged 34 and three-quarters, has called for a four-day working week and six-hour days to let people spend more time with their families and have more of a wossname: a life.

This is radical stuff, and Britain and the USA are expected to send tanks to the country immediately to put a stop to such nonsense. Indeed, didn’t Labour’s manifesto or programme or policy on the hoof indicate a similar aspiration causing much frothing at the mouth in right-wing newspaper offices up and also down the land?

It’s something you should always remember. All the talk about freedom, sovereignty, civil rights, this liberty, that liberty and parliamentary politics generally is just froth. All that really matters is the economy, by which is meant profiting from the labour of others. Threaten that with strikes or shorter days and you will feel … The Wrath.

But that’s old hat. The six-hour day is new hat, though I think it already happens in Sweden, where it’s reported to have created happier, wealthier and more productive employees. Well, there’s a surprise. In Japan, experimenting with a three-day weekend increased productivity at Microsoft there by 39.9 per cent.

Britain, unfortunately, tends to believe that the only good worker is an unhappy worker. It’s deeply felt that this is a natural law. I remember, about 25 years ago, a group of Danes coming to our then workplace and being appalled by the long, macho hours and presenteeism, all of which was just stretching out incompetence.

Our bemused visitors could sense this right away. Longer hours did not mean that more got done. My memory of offices and the eight-hour day is that at least six and a half of them were wasted.

Unlike we Britlanders, Scandinavians have a reputation for getting their work done and leaving the office early. But do we really want to do that? What would we do when we got home? Given more time there, we’d only waste it, same as we did at work.

Ms Marin mentioned families, but these are old hat nowadays and nobody can be bothered starting one, what with all the hassle and mess.

No, the second report that caught my eye regarding what we do with our time was one that said people were being referred to counsellors and therapists for binge-watching box-sets and Netflix in their spare time. Some, indeed, were doing it at work, putting their jobs at risk, and the few that still had old-fashioned families were putting a strain on these too.

So, there’s your choice: work or binge-watch telly. You say: “Not me, pal. I’d be oot walking the hills or writing a novel, ken?” This news just in: no, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know what to do with your time.

Experience teaches that the more time you have to do something the less you do it. It’s just another of life’s irritating conundrums. That said, we all want more time. Most of us have wasted our lives so far, but we still want more time so we can squander it.

All that said, I’ve never understood the eight-hour working day. Who decided that? We’ve had it for more than 100 years and, for all the “progress”, nothing has changed. They’ve even taken away our lunch hours. But I haven’t time to go into that here.

Stirring words

IT’S time for a wee declaration. A Declaration of Arbroath, that is. Draw up in 1320 by Scotland’s then leaders, it contains probably the most stirring words of resistance and principle ever written by the human hand.

To wit: “As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”

The best thing about it is that it was written before people could leave comments below the line saying it was anti-English and deluded in thinking that Scotland could run its own affairs without funding through the Longshanks Formula.

Seven hundred years on, the document is to go on display for the first time in 15 years, inspiring among foreign visitors romantic thoughts of national liberation and the accountability of monarchs to the people. Scottish people, meanwhile, will worry what effect it might have on their pensions and whether it might not be better just to keep sending our money south and getting some of it back every year.

The truth is out there

FOR some time now, hopes have started to fade that there might be aliens out there who could come and save us from ourselves. We’ve built mightier and mightier telescopes and still can’t see a thing.

YouTube shows us film of UFOs, which are always rubbish, always blurred and always just reflected light from below. Any time you see a headline about life on Mars or wherever it’s always a bleedin’ microbe. I mean what the heck use are they, with their tiny wee heids and their conspicuous lack of proper feet?

They couldn’t even fetch sticks never mind help us avoid environmental catastrophe and nuclear nuttiness.

Still, this week, the old dream of something out there received a wee boost when Dr Helen Sharman, the first Britisher to go into space, insisted that alien life existed, “no two ways about it”.

She went further, suggesting they might be among us already, without us knowing it. Well, if that’s so, they’re certainly keeping their heids doon, assuming they even have heids.

Maybe they think we’d persecute them. Maybe they don’t want to become celebrities. Or maybe they’re just too busy working an eight-hour day and binge-watching box-sets of Star Trek in their spare time.