Time
31.12.08
Time flies ….. time and tide wait for no man/woman ….. seize the day ….. take your time ….. time is the measurement of before and after.
There are probably endless combinations and permutations involving the word “time”.
New Year is all about time – time spent, gainfully or not, during the past 12 months - time available to be spent, please God and the “gods” over the coming 12 months.
Christmas suits me better because it’s bigger than time. It’s before, during and after time. That’s big.
Christmas is all about the never ending story of humanity’s place in the evolution of Wisdom.
Christmas reminds me of the possibility of the annual rebirth of commonsense for the common good.
Hard on the heels of Christmas comes a much more primitive festival of inevitability, the memorial of “auld lang syne … should old acquaintance be forgot.”
At the end of the Edinburgh Tattoo, that well known annual showing of Scotland’s memories, hopes and aspirations, a lone piper mounts the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and plays a “lament” for hopes dashed and equally importantly, great expectations for the future.
Before that poignant solo performance the massed bands of pipes and drums march off the magnificent parade ground playing a bitter sweet anthem “Black Bear” to accompany the military contingent back to barracks, back home, in fact, for soldiers everywhere.
To me, New Year is like that return to barracks, between midnight ’08 and sunrise ’09.
We battled through ’08. No need to regurgitate that 12 months. Let the media do that. Soldiers don’t have to leave the battlefield, retire to the safety and hospitality of the barracks and start, immediately discussing the previous days, weeks or months in the desert, jungle or trenches.
They need time to lick their wounds. So do we. We’ve got from midnight ’08 til sunrise ’09.
My dog, Franklin, knows these things by instinct. As soon as the bagpipes start the return to the barracks “Black Bear”, Franklin, the black dog, will growl quietly for a while, then burst into full howl!
What does Franklin feel that you and I don’t? Maybe that’s why so many of us drink so much on New Year’s Eve.
Maybe we’ve lost, with so many other instincts, the sixth sense of loss and great expectation that only a primitive, subliminal growl and howl can adequately express.
I am going to change the lettering on the magnetic board outside our church from “one star inn – vacancy” (Christmas) to “invest here ’09 – stocks are up”. (New Year and beyond: to where no one has gone before.)
R.J.M.









