Time

At forty eight, I was late to writing. It was just something I had never thought of attempting. Never once occurred to me, not even during lockdown, until I started writing a thousand word blog for our guesthouse website, purely for online optimisation.

It wasn’t something that we did in school either, not that I can remember. In English, I only remember reading set books and writing an essay about them – An Inspector Calls, which I hated; Macbeth, which I loved; and Of Mice and Men, which I’m pretty sure I enjoyed but didn’t fully appreciate at the time. I guess we must have had to write prose at some point but I don’t recall it.

And now it makes me sad, that here I am, middle-aged, having only just found my passion, yet knowing that there is so much to learn. And will I ever have enough time to tell all the stories I want to tell?

But that’s the thing about time. It creeps up on us, at the same time as running away from us. I’m often asked when I find the time to write too and I suppose there are two answers – my job involves hours of sitting and waiting for people to arrive and I make the time to do something I love, even if that means writing at midnight. Which is then usually something I regret the next morning. But when inspiration strikes you’ve just got to go with it.

It’s not as though I’ve ever been wasteful of it either, not even as a child. I always wanted to do everything, all the time, all at once. Serious FOMO, lol.

But it was when I lost my Dad, back in 1998, that I realised just how short life could be. My parents had been planning their retirement, talking excitedly about the trips they were going to take, and my dad, bless him, never made it.

So I suppose that it should be no surprise that I seem to write about time, in one way or another. Time travel is a key element of my first novel, Echoes on Derwentwater, which is part of a planned trilogy. It was inspired by a huge old oak tree on the shore of Derwentwater, when I stood beneath its canopy and commented to a friend, ‘Imagine all the history it’s seen!’ By then I’d already started researching the area’s history for the blog and found that I also loved historical research, which was fortunate.

I’ve just written a short story too, entitled Time Thief, (although I’m not totally sold on the title), from an idea I’ve had swilling around in my brain for quite a while. The protagonist is a paramedic and Robin Hood style character who can steal time from bad people and give it to good people who are about to die.

And as I read this back, I wonder, perhaps my obsession with time is just a subconscious urge to still have my dad around, enjoying the retirement he deserved. Or a need to make the very most of my own, leaving something behind, something to mark the fact I was here. Or a combination of the two, simply making the most of every minute we’re given.

And if I could actually time travel? Well apart from seeing my dad again, maybe I’d go to see Pink Floyd perform ‘Time’ in their heyday. Perhaps it’s worth going back to that ancient oak on the lakeshore and seeing if it can help. If I find it again, do you want to come too?