Sands of time...

I was in a shop at the weekend and noticed that they were selling egg-timers. Yes, egg timers, the glass and wooden ones with sand inside them. Not the electronic type with a buzzer that sounds when the egg is ready, but a genuine hour glass shaped, sands of time and all that, honest to goodness egg timer.

Now, I expect that there are a whole generation out there who have no idea what an egg-timer is or what it is used for. In fact I expect that there are a whole generation out there who don’t even know what an egg is. But as I watched the sand fall from one glass bulb to another I got to thinking…

Firstly I got to thinking about where they got the sand from? Do all egg timers have the same type of sand and is there an egg timer sand desert somewhere from where it is taken? Then I wondered just how accurate egg-timers are, after all if the grains of sand aren’t all exactly even in size and the aperture between the two glass bulbs the same width and length surely that would lead to inaccuracies.

There was only one thing for it. With ten egg timers in front of me I had to find out… time to do an experiment.

I lined up six of the egg timers and, with some dexterity, managed to position three in each hand between my thumb and palm. With a deft hand movement I flipped them over, set them upon the counter, and stood back to watch. Paul Daniels would have been proud of me.

Watching the sand trickle, I wondered if time passes in the same way, as quickly or slowly, for a wandering nomad in the desert as it sometimes seems to for me?

Time is a man-made thing. We might think that clocks and watches, calenders and diaries keep track of it for us but they don't really. Some days are an hour long, other days a week. Those precious three hours we have left to sleep often seem to be only ten minutes in length, those two days to go before Christmas are two months for an excited child.

I think Chronos plays a trick on each of us. At any moment time is passing at billions of different speeds as each of us leads our individual life in our own real time. We are moving at different speeds through time although we are occupying the same space.

As the first of the egg timers ran dry of sand I realised that each egg timer was running to its own time in just the same way that each of us runs to ours. None of those egg-timers finished at exactly the same time, the last was a good fifteen seconds after the first had come to an end.

Which is fine, unless you want to boil an egg.