mechanics of time travel: all that going back to kill your own grandfather and suddenly-waking-up-in-the-Field-of-the-Cloth-of-Gold rigmarole. I’m leaving that to the physicists and Doctor Who fanatics, and taking the rational Groucho Marx line on all of this: time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana.2
Timekeepers tracks time’s arrow in the modern age. The pace picks up with the railways and the factory, but our tour is primarily a cultural one, and occasionally a philosophical one, gathering momentum with Beethoven’s symphonies and the fanatical traditions of Swiss watchmaking. There will be the occasional sampling of wisdom from Irish and Jewish comedians. The timeline will be cyclical rather than linear, because time has a habit of folding back upon itself (the early days of cinema appear here before the early days of photography, for example). But, chronological or not, it comes with one inevitability – that sooner or later we will track down the person responsible for the adverts that claim ‘You never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation’, and try not to kill him. A little later the book will also evaluate the wisdom of time-saving gurus, examine why the CD lasts the length it does, and explain why you should think very seriously before travelling on 30 June.
But we begin at a football match, an event where timing is everything.
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1 Another of Lytton Strachey’s uncles, Uncle Bartle, wrote the definitive book – definitive up to that point at any rate – on the orchids of Burma. Yet another, Uncle Trevor, was married to a woman named Aunt Clementina, who, whenever she visited Lytton’s home in Lancaster Gate, spent her time making chapattis on the living-room carpet. One of Trevor’s and Clementina’s children died while embracing a bear.
2 The joke is attributed to Groucho Marx, although one can spend a very pleasurable weekend searching in vain for even one occurrence of him actually saying it. The expression probably originates in an article on the uses of computers in science written for Scientific American in September 1966 by the Harvard professor Anthony G. Oettinger.
Chapter One
The Accident of Time
i) Leaving the Ground
You know that thing they say about comedy being tragedy plus time? The thinking is that any terrible misfortune can be made hilarious given a suitable period to recover and reassess the situation. The film director Mel Brooks (who found that the passage of time permitted him to make fun of Hitler in The Producers) had his own version: ‘Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.’
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We had been to a football match. After three minutes of extra time, my son Jake and I untied our bikes from the railings and cycled towards Hyde Park. Chelsea’s opening game of the season had been an easy thing, 2–0 over Leicester, goals from Costa and Hazard, and we’d enjoyed being back at the ground after the summer layoff. The cycle home was good too: late August sun, the park packed with tourists.
The day was dominated by a fixture list that had appeared two months before, and the kick-off time was dictated about a month after that by the television companies. But when the day of the match finally came it was all about old rituals: when to meet up, when to have lunch, how long the pizzas take, how long until the bill arrives, the walk to the ground, the length of the turnstile queue, the songs on the PA before the game – always Blur’s ‘Parklife’ these days, coordinated with the big-screen video of past glories. And then the game itself: how slow it seems when you’re winning and waiting for the final whistle, and how quickly it goes when you’re behind.
We left a minute early to avoid the crowds, also a temporal negotiation: how does one measure the possibility of missing a last-minute goal with the value one attaches to saving ten minutes of crowd congestion? Many in the crowd chose the early departure, which almost defeated the object, and we weaved our bikes through the throngs on the Fulham Road. My youngest son Jake was 24, full of energy, slightly ahead of me along Exhibition Road and past the Albert Hall. The nice thing about Hyde Park is the modern division of the pavement, half for cyclists, half for pedestrians, and you glide past the Serpentine Gallery, a show by an artist I’d never heard of, and then suddenly I had blood pouring from my face, a pulsing gash just above my eye, my sunglasses smashed, my bike in the road, a heavy numb pain around my right elbow, a lot of concerned people, the sort of frowns on their faces that suggested to me that my head wound must be serious. Someone was calling an ambulance and another was giving me paper towels to clutch to my head, and the towels were turning crimson.
It was just as people had said: time did indeed seem to slow down. I can see the fall not exactly in slow motion but extended, each tiny event surrounding the accident elongated and logged as if it might be my last, my flight from bike to ground an elegant swoop through the air rather than an ungainly, panicky confusion, people saying ‘ambulance’ all the time. The ambulance arrived in six long minutes or so, probably finding it hard to work itself past all the supporters, and I can remember being worried about my bike, and who would tell my wife. One of the ambulance men cut open the sleeve of my jacket and flinched a little as he saw the state of my elbow. No bones exposed, but swelling like a dinner plate, and he said, ‘You’ll have that X-rayed, but I can tell you now that it’s broken!!’, and we sped on to the hospital on the Fulham Road we had passed not fifteen minutes earlier. I asked him if they were going to put the sirens on, and he asked me what had happened.
I had been undone by time. I wasn’t going fast, because the pavement was crowded. Jake was ahead of me, and there were a lot of people on our left up ahead, and one of them, a visitor from Portugal we find out later, drifted out slightly from her friends, and walked directly into my path. I knew I was going to hit her before I did, but there was no time to brake or even put my hand out, and my bike seemed to disappear underneath me as I fell forward. The Portuguese woman, perhaps mid-20s, was shocked and concerned, and Jake took her mobile number, but we have no idea where that is now. Even at the time, sitting on the grass near the Serpentine Gallery, I think I knew it could have been much worse, and my sunglasses could have shattered into my eyes, and I would have lost my sight.
Neuroscientists may be a little worn out with the amount of stories they hear of time slowing down at the scene of an accident, and they will tell you why it seems that way. Accidents are alarming and fearful things. For those tumbling over a bike or a precipice, our brain finds plenty of space for new memories to imprint themselves upon our cortex. We remember them as significant events with lots of vivid action, and when we reframe that narrative in our own heads, or tell it to others, there appears to be so much going on that it simply must have taken longer than the split second it actually did. Compared to familiar occurrences that have hardened in our cortex until we no longer have to think about them (the drive to the shops with our mind on other matters, the routines so familiar we say we can do them in our sleep), a sudden new event will require more of our brain’s attention. The unfamiliar shape of a woman as she crosses a painted white line, the loose chips of gravel, the shrieks of brakes and passers-by – these are unusual things to process when one is trying to limit the damage to vulnerable flesh.
But what actually happens in this flashbulb moment? How does a flashbulb moment seem to collide with a long exposure, something that we know to be impossible? Two small portions of our brain known as the amygdalae – groups of hyper-responsive nerve bundles in the temporal lobe concerned primarily with memory and decision-making – commandeer the rest of the brain’s functions to react in a crisis. It is something that seems to stretch a one-second fall to five seconds or more, set off by fear and sudden shocks that hit our limbic system so hard that we may never forget them. But our perceived duration distortion is just that; clock time has not in fact offered to pause or elongate for us.