Time flies...

So that’s son number one’s first term at school completed. First nativity play. First school Christmas dinner. First set of school shoes completely and utterly ruined (note to self, waterproofing spray is worth the extra money, Clarks shoes maybe not). It only feels like a few months ago rather than over 5 years, that I was overdue and awaiting arrival of son number one, let alone number two. I hear myself saying it more and more these days, (I must be getting old) where does the time go?

The weeks don’t seem to be as long as they were years ago. I remember as a child the time between Bonfire Night and Christmas seemed to last forever. So desperate were we to get to the festive period. Now Christmas and Bonfire Night all seem to be a part of the same festive blur. In fact, add Halloween to that too.

Could it be that time is actually speeding up? Is there some great conspiracy out there that is magically changing all of our clocks and making each minute actually last half the time? If that is the case, why do the days when the kids are at there most annoying seem to drag? But no matter how much hard work the kids are being, and how often I have a bad afternoon, it doesn’t seem to change the fact that the weeks and months pass by quicker than I’d care to mention.

It’s ironic that some days we wish the time away (I can’t wait for them to get to bed so I can have some me time), and others we wish time would stand still (one day they’ll grow up and I’ll be surplus to requirements).

The man has a theory. The older you get the faster time goes because each unit of time becomes a smaller percentage of the time you’ve been alive. So a 4 year old feels like a year lasts forever because it’s a quarter of their life, but to a 34 year old it feels like no time at all because it’s only a 34^th of your life. Move over Stephen Hawking. It’s a pretty good theory, and I wonder how accurate it is.

I like to think of my Facebook picture as “recent”, but in reality it is nearly a year old. I need to change it for a slightly more haggard version before I get done for false advertising. Why does it feel like that picture was taken only a few weeks ago, but at the same time, when I think of how much I have done this year I realise it feels like a different person and a different life altogether?

Time supposedly flies when you’re having fun. So does that mean that our kids (who think ten minutes is a very long time) are bored out of their skulls and us grown ups are having a whale of a time? Seems a little unfair given the amount of energy we put into giving our kids a good time (usually at a cost of fun for ourselves).

There is actually scientific evidence to back up the theory that time flies when you’re having fun. The University of St Thomas, Minnesota, for instance, conducted an experiment where they asked people to comment on their enjoyment of a task set, secretly switching a stopwatch during the task to make one group think that the task lasted 5 minutes, and the other 20. The group who believed the task lasted only 5 minutes, reported greater enjoyment than those who thought it had lasted 20. I would love to know what the actual task was, and who the people were who took part. Different people would report more enjoyment in different tasks. If you set a watching TOWIE task to me and the man, I would report a dramatic quickening of time, but the man would probably report a drastic slowing down of time and increase in general malaise.

There have been many scientific experiments about our perception of time and they all conclude that yes, time does indeed fly when you’re having fun.

So maybe the cure for time going so fast is to have a boring, unpleasant life. I think I’d rather have a speedy happy one, rather than miserably dragging it out just for the sake of it.

I’m quite happy that time flies. Apart from the odd less than positive comment from the man (“we’ll be old and dead soon” – what a cheery thought), as long as time is flying I’m having a great time. I must be. Science says so, and you can’t argue with science right?