Sixty minutes in time...

So there goes that hour again, it catches me every year; not that I forget to reset the clocks, but for the rest of the day at least - I’m running late. It’s only sixty minutes, but what a difference those sixty minutes make and throughout the day I find myself returning to that same old question – where have those sixty minutes gone?

I fell asleep with that thought flying through my mind like birds last night. Long before the official o'clock for the putting forward of time, my clocks were already changed in anticipation. 'Where have all those sixty minutes gone?' I thought as my eyes closed heavy with the lead of the day.

Almost at once I was standing in front of a long brick wall on which somebody had painted, in huge white letters: ‘waste daylight at your peril’.

Men in grey coveralls, weaved in and out of laughing children riding bicycles, boys in grey shorts and green pullovers, girls in candy striped frocks.

A siren sounded -‘Inside! Inside!’ the coveralled men began to shout, pulling on gas masks with clock-faces where the glass eyes should have been. Suddenly doors, which had been invisible until that moment, slid open in the long brick walls as the children furiously rode their bikes inside, the men following up behind. "Move along, move along."

And then the doors slid shut and from a speaker high above a man’s voice warned ‘three minutes until the hour is lost. Seek shelter if you haven’t already.”

I was getting worried, the clouds overhead were darkening, the breeze - warm only a few moments before - had turned into a cool wind. There was a hum in the air. I ran down a dark alley towards the harbour, a yacht was moored besides the harbour wall. “Wait for me! Wait for me!” I cried to the two men struggling to pull up the anchor. I ran towards the gangplank but as I got there the anchor came up and the yacht rose quickly into the air, straight up into the clear black sky, barely missing a passing passenger jet, leaving the gang plank to clatter to the quayside below.

The sky was lead, the hum a screaming roar - and then it stopped.

Black iridescent feathers began to fall from the sky as I trembled and then awoke to the sound of flapping wings.