There is an old Fry and Laurie sketch, Shakespear (sic) Masterclass in which the pedagogic lecturer, Fry, employs fresh-faced actor, Hugh, to work on a passage from Troilus and Cressida:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour’d
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done…

Act III Sc iii (or “T&C three three, that’s on page thirty-nine in your New Penguins if you’d like to follow in the tent” as Stephen Fry puts it)

They never progress beyond the first word which is, as they uncover and dissect, spelt in the ordinary way but with a capital letter (“very much upper case”) thus giving us “time in a conventional sense but also an abstract sense”.   The focus intensifies and Hugh is directed to convey all of this in his utterance of the single word:  Time (about 3 mins 30 seconds in to the sketch).    Fry is not impressed by this delivery

What went wrong there, Hugh?

I don’t know I got a bit lost in the middle, I think.

We are in these middle days, between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, when the presents gifted by my True Love become more unmanageable, impractical and immemorable:  geese, milkmaids, lords, pipers and ladies in an insecure order. We all forget which day of the week it is, and the date.  At the risk of sounding like an Alan Bennett sermon, we all get a bit lost in the middle.

I finished full-time work in the summer and am still in peri-retirement.  I’m not quite sure whether I have paused between jobs or ended employment for the rest of my life.  My partner is the same.  We are surrounded by inter-linked choices:  if we don’t work, what do we want to do instead? Given the things we want to do, can we afford to do them if we don’t do paid work any more? What wished-for things would we prefer to give up, now, making them forever unaffordable, for the priceless luxury of freedom from routine and stress?  What chances, must we recognise, are already long past? And where, now, should we turn to find structure, impetus for the day, tasks which give a sense of achievement, comradeship, opportunities to learn and stretch the mind?

And the bigger questions. Without a daily, weekly structure of work days, how do I differentiate these diurnal cycles, lunar orbits, the moving shifting seasons?   Numbered dates are only one way we fix these.  There are also old names, drawing from the church calendar and rooted in folk traditions and rural patterns:  a friend and I, seeking to reduce our alcohol intake for a period of time, but arrogantly resistant to the popular label of ‘Dry January’, are going to change our habits from Twelfth Night to Candlemas.  Other named days obtrude:  I welcome the opportunity my phone offers to have yearly reminders of events, not only births but also deaths, weddings, funerals, historical battles and socialist revolts, obscure saints (St Thomas of Canterbury, 29^th December), and other idiosyncratically significant happenings. A year is just long enough to nearly forget, just as, each year, I find I have slightly forgotten how beautiful and heart-lifting are the signs of spring.  Hardy and David Nicholls remind us that we also pass, unaware, through anniversaries of future events, most especially our future final day.  

We spend our days treading these double patterns of cyclical and linear time, eternal and mortal, the first a dance in which our spirit rejoices and the latter a finite march.  We must attend to both and, paradoxically. the way to do this best seems, often, to focus on their common point of intersection: the current moment. Quick now, here, now, always as Eliot puts it (there is nothing I can write here which is new, which has not been expressed infinitely better by someone else.  Even the sense of repetition (You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?)).

Yesterday, we walked through the park and noted the birdsong.  The lockdown of 2020 changed, I hope for ever, my awareness of birdsong in London.  I think it attuned my ear to listen over the ground bass of traffic and talk and footfall.  Now, I often find myself stopped in my tracks by some melodic call, always unrecognisable due to my entire ignorance of anything which isn’t cuckoo or wood pigeon. There is a sweetly trilling bird which occupies one of the trees on the street where I live and sings as, in these winter months, the grey darkness (never pitch black in London) slowly shifts towards a brief, light-rationed day.  It starts at about five in December.  I am an intermittent sleeper and lying listening to its freely wandering, melodic snatches creates – inspires – in me a deep gratitude, entirely bound in appreciating the moment, now And again now, and now, and now, as Ted Hughes puts it.  And of course, immediately, then and again then and then and then.  Experienced and at once passed, past.  Yet, in the moment, transcendent.  Losing myself in the middle.