Thoughts on Time and Memory

A couple of rather abstract concepts have been occupying my thoughts lately the first of which is Time.

 Time can be measured in years, months, weeks, days and each day can be split into hours, minutes and seconds (and if you are competing in the Commonwealth Games into fractions of seconds!)

But what a slippery eel time can be - although it passes in measurable units it doesn't seem that way at all.  Remember being a child and "in a minute" being an absolute age to wait?  Why is it that almost any retired person will agree that once you leave work with all those empty hours ahead, in which to do all the things you used to dream of, suddenly there are less hours in each day and less days in each week or so it would seem!  How can this be?  When I look back I remember finding time to cycle to work, to cultivate an allotment, to sew and knit clothes for the Wanderer, to bake cakes and make my own bread and to go for walks gathering blackberries and crab apples to make into jams and puddings before I had to pick her up from school and still having "change from half a crown" as the old Hovis ad used to say! (or did it?)  Now I get to the end of the day and realise I haven't actually done anything much at all some days.  How can that be?  Or is it down to the other concept I have been thinking about?  Maybe I didn't do all those thing every day it just seems like that.

Memory - is another slippery character - it can't be measured (unless we are being asked what is the date today and who is the Prime Minister as we are diagnosed as having or not having Alzhiemer's - do they really ask such questions I wonder as if so I might be suffering already!)  but it's there alright.  Why is it that I can remember in vivid detail things that happened back in the 1940s but have difficulty in remembering what I did yesterday?  But memory is a real gift and is something which nobody can take away from us.  My days out (which maybe one of the reasons I don't get much done) are filling my memory bank so that in the winter I can call up the sunny memories to keep me going through the months which always seem much longer than the summer ones - see Time above!!

All kinds of things trigger memories - for me it might be flowers - you might remember me telling you about the snowdrops at Pope's Hill back when I was writing about my childhood perhaps, colours especially in combination such as bright blue and buttercup yellow which immediately remind me of some sheets of paper I was given as a 6 year old to cut up and make patterns with or perhaps lime green and turquoise which were the colours in a check dress for a paper doll which came each week in my mother's magazine.  Who remembers dressing a card doll with cut out paper clothes fitted with little fold over tabs? Sounds such as classical piano music which reminds me of school assemblies, smells such as warm milk reminding me of having to drink those little third of a pint bottles at playtime at school - no refrigeration for the bottles they just sat in the crates getting warm and horrible all morning, and so on and so on.  Truly memory is a marvellous thing even if it cannot be measured and it also cannot always be believed!

For those who enjoy coming with me on my outings I am off to London again on Friday so will share that outing with you when I get back - it's no wonder I don't get much done at home is it?!   Having been inspired by the crazy patchwork we saw at the Tate Britain last week I took advantage of the wet weather on Friday afternoon to make a start on a piece myself.  When I have stitched this I intend to use it on a small bag - watch this space!  So perhaps if I were to write a diary of what I do it wouldn't all be time wasted and in any case maybe sitting in the garden musing on this and that is not time wasted anyway but just another memory for my mental scrapbook!

Just received this link from a friend - imagine what a memory this might be if you were lucky enough to come across it!