TIME TROTTERS, TWISTERS AND TERPSICHOREAN TEENAGERS
Odd isn’t it, how time seems to speed up
while we poor wrinklies slow down. Odd, how weekends whistle by.
How, no sooner do I fill in the last clue of my Saturday morning
crossword puzzle (swank, swank) that I am subjected to an aural
battering from the Monday morning alarm. And kids don’t help
do they, with their megawatt energy banks fizzing and crackling
all over the place. With their Hip Hop and House music and their
Technicolor threads in ear numbing, eye dazzling competition for
attention.
Take my teenage daughter Danielle (somebody please!)
For her time is an arthritic snail on crutches. She can’t
wait to be nineteen. She can’t wait to take her driving test
(again). She can’t wait for Friday night, so she can go boogie-ing
– or whatever they call it now – the night away to the
strains (I choose that word deliberately) of the latest groups of
tone deaf, stridulous and musically challenged morons, with her
pal Becky and their escort Collie.
Collie is their minder. He wears lilac trousers
hacked off just below the knees, by, it would appear, a knife and
fork. He bears more than a passing resemblance to a sheepdog.
‘Is that why,’ I said, ‘he’s called Collie?’
‘It’s Colin act-ually father’, she says patiently.
‘Oh.’ I say. ‘Could do with a haircut.’
‘He needs his curtains trimming.’ She says. Now this
brings on an odd feeling of dislocation. Did I nod off for a few
seconds? This is not entirely impossible as I am supine at the time,
and it has been known to happen before – particularly when
her dear mother, Val, has been bending my ear with some riveting
tale of inter-street intrigue. I decide to play it cool.
‘Tell him to bring them over. Your mother
will sort them out in two shakes.’ She looks at Becky. Becky
looks at Collie. They all look at me – with a kind of sad
pity in their eyes. I feel like a mental defective.
‘Curtains is hair dad. See…’ she points to Collie’s
wild thatch. ‘It’s parted in the middle, like, you know…curtains.’
‘I knew that!’ I say. ‘Just engaging in a little
humour!’ I decide to wrest back the initiative.
‘And what do you do Collie?’ She answers for him.
‘He’s a footballer. He’s just signed for Rochdale.’
‘Really? I say. ‘That’s interesting. And are you
any good?’ He opens his mouth to speak; but he is beaten to
it.
‘Daaad! You can’t ask him that, he’s shy!’
‘Sorry.’ I mutter, chastened. ‘Thought all teenage
lads were full of themselves…’ Later when Collie has
trotted off home I ask her point blank: ‘do I detect a hint
of romance in the air? You and Colin?’ She turns her eyes
heavenwards, shakes her head slowly and sighs. ‘Far-ther…He
isn’t even seventeen yet!’
And another thing; she can’t even sit still
for more than nine seconds without her left leg going into terminal
spasms (unless of course she’s furthering her education by
watching Neighbours or Home and Away).
‘It’ll spread!’ I say. ‘You’ll end
up a quivering mess…your brain turned to jelly…’
Talk to the proverbial.
‘It’s energy dad. I’ve got too much.’
‘Go and help your mother with the washing up then.’
‘Dancin energy dad. Not menial housework energy.’ She
says slowly, patiently, as though speaking to a particularly obtuse
lump of pig poo.
And the son and heir to my debts. He’s not
much better, even though he has passed from the vale of teens into
the full flush of lumbering manhood. He uses the house (his bed)
like Dracula uses his coffin – a sort of temporary regeneration
chamber between bouts of excess. Time for him does not exist. He
phones up to ask what’s for dinner. Says he’ll be home
in twenty minutes…then turns up a week on Tuesday.
ANYWAY. ‘Procrastination’, as the
man says, ‘is the thief of time’. I was telling you
how time tends to speed up as I get more 'mature'. I have a
theory for this.
I think it is caused by millions of joggers and
marathon runners trotting willy-nilly all over the place. OK, so
scoff if you like, but listen. The earth is spinning, right? Has
done since the dawn of time, right? So, suppose the majority of
these crazy joggers and trotters – and for that matter our
terpsichorean teenagers who, it would seem, spend hour after hour
slow motion running on the spot (dancing!) – are doing it
in the opposite direction to the earth’s rotation. In the
case of joggers and trotters this directional thing does bear out
when you think about it. Why? Because if they ran with the direction
of rotation (anti-clockwise) they would be running with the sun’s
rays in their eyes in the morning (when, presumably most activities
of such a nature take place) thus obliging them to cope with the
inconvenience of wearing sunglasses. Now, every time these globetrotting
freaks put a foot down and thrust themselves forward they are pushing
backwards with the earth’s rotation! Say there are about 10
million of them at any one time and each weighs on average about
168 pounds (joggers are for the most part, corpulent, otherwise
they wouldn’t be jogging) that would amount to 2,956,800,000,000
pounds of thrust per mile! They’re bound to speed the bloody
thing up and muck up our internal clocks!
You think I’m barmy don’t you? Well
let me tell you this: I’ve felt time speeding up for, oh,
the last twenty years or so. And how long has jogging and marathon
running and crazy dancing been popular? I rest my case.
And another thing. This mucking about with the
basic fabric of time is causing all this weather we’ve been
having. Stands to reason doesn’t it. For trillions of years
the old globe has been rolling along, everything nicely in place…then
these environmentally irresponsible hooligans come along and speed
it up. Is it any wonder that the atmosphere gets all confused and
rips holes in itself – and we end up with a severe dose of
meteorological mayhem? Monsoons in Morocco, snow in Sierra Leone,
hurricanes in Hastings. Where will it all end? Still, there is one
thing, I suppose we can all be grateful for – we don’t
get any of those really big twisters over here; those tornado’s
that they get in other countries. I have a theory for this. They
get these things in America, right? And which side of the road do
they drive on in America? The wrong side, right! And what is a tornado?
It is an anti-cyclone. Air circulating in an anti-clockwise direction
and exacerbated by millions of motor vehicles passing each other
on the left! Proof? Ok when did you last see a mega tornado
hoovering up in downtown Manchester or Milton Keynes? There you
are then. And I’ll tell you another thing. It is probably
only this green and pleasant land, this sceptred isle (and a few
far-flung colonies) that is keeping the dark realms of climactic
chaos at bay by driving on the ‘right’ side of the road.
Who said we weren’t great anymore!
© Peter Clayfield, November 2005
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Techies, Trains
& Tide Tables
Wo-Men
Ass-inine Articulations
Antithetical Assertions
(Or: Antithesis Rules - OK?)
Time Trotters,
Twisters and Terpsichorean Teenagers
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