Spring Ahead Or Fall Behind

What is time passing? It is the earth's rotation around the sun, it is the spinning of the earth around its axis, darkness followed by daylight over and over again. It is the growth of plants, the return of leaves to dark trees, the vase of big yellow daffodils with slightly twisting petals. The pseudo ticking of the electric wall clock in the kitchen divides up the day into tiny segments, like grains of sand falling through the narrow middle of the egg timer. I felt this interminable progress from second to second, when as a child I moved slowly, silently from room to room, hearing, in the dining room the steady metallic clunking tick and whirr of the grandfather clock, in the kitchen the perkier, impatient tick of the red clock, a melamine plate hanging high on the wall. I pulled my feet out of the sucking mud of inertia to get from one end of the house to the other, one end of the day to the other. There was nothing happening. All space in between, no thing. What was the thing? There was breakfast, lunch, supper, even tea with chocolate spread on toast, there was television, there was my father leaving for work in the morning before I set off for school, returning on the 6.15, to come home and wash London off his face and hands, to eat handfuls of peanuts from the jar in the larder, to drink whisky and soda as he sat in his wing-back chair, while he studied the Times crossword. My mother in the kichen preparing supper to be ready at 8 o'clock, no sooner, no later. The Archers on the radio. Me in my green school uniform, going back and forth to school, down the hill, along the length of Charles Street, right into Kings Road, across the crossing. There were the school holidays when I wondered what to do. The default position of my life, this wondering what to do. I've always struggled to get started unless someone else's protocols set the terms - family routines and rituals, school rules and requirements. There'd be tropical fish to feed and occasionally clean out, a record player on the floor, mono, to play my brother's records on, and later my own. There was endless homework, and sometimes there was helping my mother (though not that much), and there were my collections of marbles and of cars, and there were books everywhere, and there was the garden, and there was the big white toy cupboard with the double doors, full of toys - etch-a-sketch and a humming top, a wooden truck with wooden barrels that rolled up a little ramp and sat on the back, kept in place by chains, and a flower press. And all the empty space in between, where nothing was.