Time Flies

[delboy]

Sat in the office with that normal January feeling, that normal "slap-bang in the middle of my working life" feeling (acts of God and accidents with toasters and baths, notwithstanding), pondering on the number of years ahead of me before, again, God-willing, I get to enjoy a well deserved retirement, and I pick up a sheaf of old "working day" calendars. Wow, these are all my calendars going back for more than 20 years. Not much detail on them, not like a diary, but in terms of working years there are probably more behind me now than ahead of me. Most interestingly (for me, and probably only me), I tended to put my gigs on these calendars. I can see that in May, 1989, my then band played a gig in Cheltenham just a few days before my wedding (how did I swing that? The gig, not the wedding!). In July I went to see Little Feat at the Hammersmith Odeon and in November of the same year I was in the final of a quiz competition in Bristol (we won - a trip to Austria and then Berlin - just as the wall came down). June 26th, 1992, my band played at The Glastonbury festival. By '94 I was in a country band and by 97 in a rock/blues band and also playing regular acoustic 'Dylan Nights' in Birmingham. Several other bands and scores of gigs all around the country followed before settling in to today's more sedate rock'n'roll existance. My divorce isn't mentioned but I suspect that I did a gig a few days before it! Kind of scary looking back on all of this. None of it feels that long ago. Maybe time really does speed up the older you get.

Derek

[Ed]

I think it does speed up as you get older, up to the point where your kids leave home, and then you're on slow time until they have grandkids for you to look after. Then you have a hectic few years until your grandkids grow up, or you die. It's all down to having kids around.

I bumped into a guy who used to be in the same class as me at college, and I hadn't seen him in ten years or more. I said how the last ten years seemed to have flown by in the blink of an eye, expecting him to agree with me, but he didn't -- to him the time had dragged. The only difference between us was he never had kids, or as I like to call them, time vampires.