TIME TRAVAILS

I know many people loath our twice-yearly clock-changes, but for me it is simply frustration at the fact that, right now – TODAY – I have absolutely no clear idea what the time actually is! 

 

Our flat has quite a few clocks (there's at least one in every room – except the loo!): but whilst some, for example those on computers and phones, change automatically, others do not: the clocks on the oven and the central-heating thermostat; the glass fish-shaped clock from Venice in the bathroom; my Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs clock in my office area (signed, I might add, by Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White); the grandfather clock in the dining room that, at this turning-back-time of the year, either has to be stopped for an hour or moved forward eleven hours (with all those hourly bell-chimes!) plus several other time-pieces in various locations. 

 

As a result, the day after the clock change, I find myself wandering from room to room as if from one time-zone to another time-zone. In fact, right now, passing though any door in the flat is like repeatedly going in and out of the TARDIS!

 

 

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TIME UP!

For the past 15 years I've been coming to Kalymnos: the first thing I have done on arrival is stop the battery in my watch so as to be able to live solely by my body clock.

Alas, my time in the place where time stands still has come to an end, so I need to let Jiminy restart the process of calibrating my seconds, minutes and hours...

 

Farewell, Kalymnos!

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

After a year of domestic upheavals and sojourns in hospital, it's time to relax with a little sun and sea on our favourite Greek island, Kalymnos...

This will be our twelfth annual visit and, as readers of this blog may remember, I have a ritual that is unerringly observed: when we arrive at Artistico taverna in Emporios, I take off my watch, pull out the winder and it stays off until it's time to return to reality...

 And, of course, Snoopy is always glad to give his little arms a rest!

While we are away (and probably not able to blog efficiently) I will be leaving you with a few Greek Pick of the Pixs to amuse you...

NIGHT TIMES

Whenever I wake up in the night (as I regularly do, tonight being no exception) I always attempt to guess the time before putting on my specs and looking at the clock.

The amazing thing is that I can accurately (within ten minutes or less) predict the time 99.9 times out of 100.

Can anyone else do this?

Image: LayoutSparks.com

HOLIDAY SNAPS

When I arrived in Emporios at the beginning of our holiday, I took off my watch and pulled out the winder - leaving Snoopy having to hold out his arms at 2:46 pm for the next two weeks!

There were two reasons for doing this: firstly because I don't want to be constantly reminded that time is passing - especially in a place where time pretty much stands still - and because I actually enjoy telling the time (when I need to know) without mechanical aid. You'd be surprised how adept one can become at this: and when I am checked by others, I am invariable little more than 10 or 15 fast or slow and quite often spot on.

And, yes, so little do I do when on holiday, I actually took a photo of Snoopy not keeping time!

To be honest, I'm no longer sure sure why I take a camera when I go on holiday to Kalymnos since - over the course of the past nine years - I have photographed pretty much everything there is to photograph. But then that has, in itself, become one of my traditional holiday activities.

For example, this year, I, once again, photographed George playing his guitar...

...and, as before, I dutifully snapped my regular breakfast of fresh fruit, yoghurt and Kalymnian honey...

...managed, yet again, to catch David early morning skinny-dipping...

...and, for the umpteenth time, photographed the little red row boat at the end of the bay...

...knowing, even as I did so, that I will never take one better than the first one I ever took!

Still, we all need the occasional challenge - even on holiday and however modest!

MY FIRST ABC

I was kind-of 'tagged' by Sibley-blog-regular, SCB (alias Where there are Meadowlarks), with a meme based on the Alphabet.

So, here's my ABC - which stands, in case you wondered, for Autobiographically Blogged Confessional...


A – Age: 59 --- for five more days only!

I will be, as the mathematicians amongst you will by now have deduced, 60 on 14 July.

In fact I've already received my application for my winter fuel allowance. Am I at all depressed? Well, what do you think?

B – Bed Size: Super King Size - and, even with all that room (as David will unhappily testify) I still take up more than my half!

C – Chore you hate: All chores! That's why they're called 'chores'! The clue's in the word!

D – Dog’s name: I've never owned a dog, probably because when I was a small boy, some friends of my parents had a poodle who mistook me for a tree (or, possibly, a lamppost) and peed up my leg!

Favourite fictional dogs (mostly - but not entirely - with Disney connections): Lady and the Tramp (and their canine companions), the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Old Yeller, Greyfriars Bobby, Rin Tin Tin, Pluto, Toto and, obviously, Snoopy...

E – Essential start your day: Tea, toast and marmalade.

F – Favourite color: The fact that I can't instantly name a favourite colour means I probably don't have one - other than black, of course, which is what I wear most of the time under the misbegotten belief that it makes me look slimmer.

G – Gold or Silver: I don't have much of either and rarely wear what I have. I occasionally wear the gold signet ring with a blood stone that my parents gave me when I was 21, a gold bracelet that I bought with birthday money when I was forty and a silver cross given to me, a few years ago, by our friends on Kalymnos.

Every now and again I wear my mother's wedding ring on a gold chain which was a birthday present from my friend Dave, twenty years ago.

And, of course, I constantly wear my white and yellow gold partnership ring - which matches David's and came from Athens...

H – Height: 5′10.5″ I fervently believe I used to be taller but have, in keeping with my advancing years, now started to shrink - except, needless to say, around the waist!

I – Instruments you play(ed): The recorder, tambourine and triangle - at school and badly!

If the human voice counts, I sang as a Policeman (in a papier mache helmet and with a rubber truncheon) in a school production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance ("Tarantara, tarantara!") and almost sang the role of Captain Corcoran in G&S's H M S Pinafore - until the music mistress had a breakdown and never came back!

Many years later - I sang and (sort-of) danced in To Sea in a Sieve, a musical play based on the life and verses of Edward Lear (right) written with my composer friend, Dave Hewson, and performed with Polly March (playing everyone except Edward Lear, including Queen Victoria and a parrot!) at the Edinburgh Festival and then at the Westminster Theatre, London.

I also sang a bit - in a Rex Harrisonesque fashion - in a show entitled, England, Our England, compiled and presented with my friends Ms March and Tony Miall which opened the St James's Arts Centre in Malta. The description 'international singer', would, therefore, not be entirely unjustified!

J – Job title: 'Writer'. It used to 'Writer and Broadcaster', but since I hardly ever get to do the latter nowadays, it seems a bit presumptuous.

K – Kid(s): None. Though, happily, quite a few of my grown-up friends fall into this category!

L – Living arrangements: Flat but the word 'arrangement' really does not apply to the constant muddle in which we live!

M – Mom’s name: Doris. As a young woman she was very handsome and my first memories are of her looking very much like this...

She died 10 years ago, but I still wish I could pick up the phone and talk with her...

N – Nicknames: At school I was 'Sibbers' (which I never liked but had to get used to) and, to a few people, 'Bri' (which I've always hated). More cruelly, I was 'Frog's-eyes' (because of their prominence) and, when I started wearing specs, inevitably, 'Four-eyes'.

Occasionally, people have jokingly called me 'Brain'! In fact, when I was born, my Mum misspelled my name thus in announcing my arrival to my paternal grandparents. Nowadays, it's only my magician friend, Fay Presto, who uses that moniker.

My mate, Dave (collaborator on the aforementioned Lear musical) used to call me 'Brisy' which was a bit camp - even for me - and, thankfully, never really caught on!

O – Overnight hospital stay other than birth: Major internal operation, aged 3 or 4, performed in the early hours of morning. Being in the days before parents were allowed to stay with their children in hospital, I was alone except for my white polar (teddy) bear, Brumas (see later under 'Z' for 'Zoo'), and was utterly terrified! I carry the physical and psychological scars to this day.

I had a duodenal ulcer, aged 21 (cured with several weeks of bed rest and a liquid diet - yuck!); and, rather more recently, a few heart-scares. Undoubtedly (and unfortunately) there's more to come...

P – Pet Peeve: Waiters (and other people in the so-called 'service industries') who tell me that something I've requested is "No problem!" Also most other debasements of the English Language!

Q – Quote from a movie: "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"

Said by Clarence Oddbody the Angel (Henry Travers) to George Bailey (James Stewart) in Frank Capra's 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life.

Or...

"If you can't say nuffin' nice, don't say nuffin' at all!"

Spoken by Thumper (quoting his father's advice) in Disney's 1941 animated feature, Bambi.

R – Right or left handed: Right. Always thought it would be cool (and occasionally useful) to be ambidextrous but have never seriously tried and am terrified of breaking my right arm!

S – Sports: Er... No!!

T – Time you wake up: Depends how bad a night I've had. Usually around 7:00-7:30 am, but I'm frequently having a cuppa and doing correspondence, writing blogs and playing Bejewelled at 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning.

U – Underwear: Have you read my blog?!

One thing I know: underwear advertising has certainly changed during my lifetime...

Er... Just a little...

V – Vegetable you dislike: Aubergine, which is a pity, because, uncooked, they look so beautiful.

That said, Irene Glinatsi at Artistico (in Emporios) serves them thinly sliced, battered and drizzled in Kalymnian honey. Sensational!

W – Ways you run late: Believing that David is really ready to go when he says he's ready to go! Believing I'm ready to go, when I've yet to locate my keys, watch, phone, credit card or brain...

X – X-rays you’ve had: Chest, hips, feet, knees and (using a long tube with a camera on the end) boomp-sa-daisy.

Y – Yummy food you make: Never cook these days, but I used to make a mean cottage pie and a rather good strawberry fool-type desert with semi-frozen Muller Light.

Z – Zoo favorite: I vividly remember my first visit to the London Zoo as a child (age 2 or 3) having a ride on an elephant and seeing the polar bear, Ivy and her cub, Brumas, who had been born four months after me in November 1949.

I was re-introduced to the zoo by a zoology-mad school chum and, a few years later, became a member of the Zoological Society of London going there at least two or three times a month.

I still love all zoos (if they're well run) and most of their inhabitants - except reptiles and insects. Particular favourites: bears and elephants (of which - quite rightly - there are now fewer or none in zoos), giraffes, hippos (the one below lives in Amsterdam zoo), red pandas, otters, penguins and pelicans.

So, that's it: ME from A to Zee!

Now, let's see...

I'll tag... Sharon M, Bitter Animator, Good Dog, Susan D-L, Diva of Deception, the blog-less Roger and/or Sheila (send your entry as a comment) and anyone else who fancies a challenge!

Quite a few of the images were uploaded via flickr.

BRIDGEWORK

Do you know how many bridges there are in Venice?

FOUR HUNDRED AND NINE!

Although, to be fair, some sources say 378 and still others 400, but then we are talking about the city of mystery and - in any case - there is, as of last year, a new bridge, so it may well be time for a recount...


The Ponte di Calatrava (designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava) is Venice's first new bridge in seventy years - and only the fourth to cross the Grand Canal - but it has been the subject of ceaseless debate and criticism, chiefly for its design which uses traditional Venetian materials of glass and stone but a great deal of chunky iron underwear and has a functional modernity that is at odds with the classical architecture of most of the city...


It has also been slated for its lack functionality: unevenly placed steps on the ascent and descent that are a tripping hazard and also - since many of the steps are glass - a slipping hazard in wet and icy weather...


Then there is the cost: several times beyond the approved budget (even without the decorations that were originally intended for it, but which, somehow, got left off drawings!) and which is destined to rise even more as the bridge now has to be adapted to provide wheelchair access under modern-day Italian laws relating to disabled access...

As for all those other bridges (however many they are): they span some of the 150 canals that divide the island city of Venice into what are, effectively, 118 smaller islands...

After eleven years of visiting we still haven't crossed all those bridges, but here are a few we have traversed, some of them many times...

***

Meanwhile...

Did you know that at midnight tomorrow, New Year's Eve, Greenwich Mean Time will be given a Leap Second? As Wikipedia explains...

A leap second is a one-second adjustment that keeps broadcast standards for time of day close to mean solar time. Broadcast standards for civil time are based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), a time standard which is maintained using extremely precise atomic clocks.

To keep the UTC broadcast standard close to mean solar time, UTC is occasionally corrected by an intercalary adjustment, or "leap", of one second... When a positive leap second is added at 23:59:60 UTC, it delays the start of the following UTC day (at 00:00:00 UTC) by one second, effectively slowing the UTC clock.

So, at midnight tomorrow, there will be seven - not six time - 'pips' and just before you get to shout HAPPY NEW YEAR, you'll have one whole second of extra life!

Make sure you live it -- to the full!!

Oh, yes, and still on the subject of timings... I know that Christmas is been and gone and that the shops are full of New Year Sales (instead of the Pre-Christmas Sales) and that the Radio Times contains more summer holiday advertisements than programme details, but there's still time - although not much - in which to catch Wendy Hiller and Alec McCowen in my Christmas radio dramatisation of The Fox at the Manger.

Based on the story by P L Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, it can be heard, on-line, until 31 December via the BBC's Radio 7 iPlayer (you'll find The Fox on the alphabetical listing of shows) but you've only got today and tomorrow to tune in!

***

And FINALLY...

A FOOTNOTE on the Ponte di Calatrava...

The original glass steps had - at more expense - to be made opaque as voyeurs were (apparently) photographing up the skirts of women from boats passing underneath...

These Italians! Any excuse!


Images: Brian Sibley & David Weeks © 2006/8

For more Venice imagery, visit my website to view the album Venice Observed and then follow the links at the foot of that page to three further albums of photographs.

GREEK TIME

Well, it's that time of the year again and we are off to the Greek island of Kalymnos in the Dodecanese.

This means that, for a few weeks - whilst blogging will most certainly continue - the posting of your comments may at times be a bit erratic! If so, this will be due to a phenomenon (known to anyone who's ever visited Greece) as GREEK TIME!

As it happens, the Greeks have two words for TIME...

CHRONOS and KAIROS

Chronos is quantity of time: chronological or sequential time, time in progress - hence our everyday words chronicle, chronology and chronic.

Kairos is quality of time: significant rather than dimensional time, the fleeting moment of now; impossible to measure other than in terms of its significance or specialness - a time, you might say, between times...

Chronos will undoubtedly march relentlessly on over the next few weeks, but I hope that Kairos will provide a few memorable moments...


You can read about Kalymnos - and, in particular, the village of Emporios where we stay - in my website essay Heaven on Earth!

Image: David Weeks © 2007

KPIΣTOΣ ANEΣTI

EASTER GREETINGS
to
All My Greek Friends
and Friends of Greece

I'm sure you know, but if you don't - and have ever wondered - the reason why the Greek (and Russian) Orthodox Church celebrates Easter at a different time to most of us, is because it still calculates the date of the festival using the Julian Calendar, while the rest of us determine the date of Easter using the Gregorian calendar.

The Julian calendar was designed by the astronomer Sosigenes and introduced in 46 BC, by the emperor Julius Caesar. It was this calendar that, for the first time, divided the year into 365 days grouped into 12 months and with an extra (leap year) day added to February every four years.

A reform of the Julian calendar was first proposed by the Calabrian doctor, Aloysius Lilius, and decreed under a papal bull issued by Pope Gregory XIII - after whom it was named - on 24 February 1582.

There are lots of fascinating facts about these two calendars and how and why they were devised and the curious might care to check out Wikipedia's entries on the Julian and the Gregorian calendars while the exceptionally curious will find even more about both - as well as calendars used in Aztec, Bahia, Egyptian, Hebrew, Indian, Islamic and a other cultures - at Calendopedia: The Encyclopedia of Calendars!

It's all a reminder, I suppose, of both how arbitrary are our notions of the passage of time and, of course, how utterly fleeting it is...

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh, yes, and don't forget to check out Buttons' thoughts on the subject...

Image: The Church of St John the Baptist, Pothia, Kalymnos, Greece
© Brian Sibley 2006

PHILOSOPHICALLY SPEAKING

The Greeks, as they say, have a word for it; in proof of which, Irene Glinatsi occasionally introduces a Greek phrase or saying into the conversation such as, “When the water gets into the stream,” meaning when things settle down into their natural course; or, “It’s only the mountains that never meet,” which is a Kalymnian variation on our more prosaic expression, “It’s a small world…”


When Irene’s eleven-year-old son, Themelis, is not running wild, he is also clearly a born philosopher. As our friend, Gill, was preparing to leave Emporios the other week after her seventh or eighth visit, the youngest Glinatsi announced that, “The puzzle that is Artistico will now be missing an important piece and will not be complete again until Gill returns.”

And, the other day, when I was explaining to Themelis’ father that something that I had said was “a joke”, the lad sagaciously observed: “All life is a joke! We come; we make our little jokes; and then - poof! - Goodbye! See you in the next place!”

DISNEY TIME

In a recent post, Anna at bluelikethis (a blog, by the way, of which I am a big fan) took the cultural leap from reading Time magazine to listening to Disney music - possibly (ego says "Yes"!) on a series called Ain't No Mickey Mouse Music currently being reprised on BBC Radio 2 'Listen Again'.

Actually, it wasn't so much of a leap, as one small step for a mouse, since Disney's films (and the latter-day ups and down in the kingdom of pixie-dust) have been continuously chronicled in the pages of Time and interestingly - though not surprisingly - the Mouse-meister was, personally, twice featured on the cover: on 27 December 1937, celebrating the landmark release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; and on the same date in 1954, when Disney was moving into his second 'Golden Age' of animation and diversifying into television and - his own unique invention - the theme-park business, brand-named: 'Disneyland'.


Click on images to enlarge.

Regardless of whether or not you are a Disney fan, there are many fascinating examples of Time cover-art and articles from over eighty years of publishing to be found in the excellent Time Archive.