If only time was more like plasticine

I am typing this as I sit in one of our boardrooms.

I’m waiting for a meeting. I’m always waiting for meetings. Nobody ever shows up at the time at which Outlook says a meeting should start; sometimes it’s because I didn’t get the update, or there’s been a last-minute cancellation, or everybody else has long since learned not to be on time because they don’t want to sit around either.

For some reason, my mind wonders back to my childhood, to plasticine. Remember how it would arrive in packets bought at the CNA, in ridged strips of colour, like liquorice? It had a distinctive smell which became stronger as it warmed in my hands. When I played with it, it would get trapped under my fingernails and my mother would clean them out with scissors, which was a little bit scary.

Plasticine was one of the staples of nursery school, along with Lego and fingerpaints and Tinker Toy. I could have hours of fun with it, rolling it into sausages and turning it into modelled cows and dinosaurs and cats. At night, I’d even dream of it: sausages of plasticine in various colours, passing up and down through shelves, rather like Morph, only less entertaining.

(Tony Hart had a lot to answer for.)

My point — yes, there is a point — is that it’s a great pity that time is not more like plasticine, where one could gather up all the little bits and pieces — the leftover minutes and hours that were spent waiting for meetings to start, standing in queues, sitting in traffic, watching someone else’s food go round and round in the microwave — and squash them together into usable hours, like one big ball that gradually turns the colour of mud.

If only.

So much time in our lives goes to waste, after all. The seconds dribble into minutes and pool into hours, like a leaking tap. If we added it all up, we’d probably have enough time to write a great novel or fix world poverty. Or enjoy the leisure to do something we love, but can’t justify otherwise. The sort of things we tell ourselves we never have time for, like travel, or reading a book, or a proper conversation with somebody we love.

Time is much too precious to spend it sitting around waiting.

PS I discovered, through researching this post, that plasticine is flammable at very high temperatures. You learn something new every day