My how time flies on all fronts some days

There are days, and today is one of them, when everything, but everything, says time is flying.

Tempus fugit, they used to write on sundials — and may still do, for all I know, there being, you’ll be shocked to hear, few sundial-makers among my friends — because it is the sort of trite and corny statement of the obvious that needs to be said in Latin to be taken seriously. But the point about trite and corny statements of the obvious is that they’re also true. Tempus does indeed fugit. And some days you can see it on the move, can hear the whirring of its wings.

I am typing this to the noise of a youth on the other side of the wall splitting firewood. I normally split my own and was duly doing so last week but as I raised the splitter overhead in preparation for bringing it down on a particularly recalcitrant log, a log of knots and whorls and attitude, I heard a voice. I paused, splitter on high, and cocked an ear. That voice again. The lower right side of my back was speaking, quietly but authoritatively. "You’re too old for this," it said.

"Pfui," I said, and brought the splitter down only to discover that the lower right side of my back was dead right. Two blister packs of ibuprofen, a quart of Deep Heat and a hilarious physiotherapy session later, I rang the youth who’s currently at work on the other side of this wall to offer him the job. He is a quarter my age, has only just started shaving and the lower right side of his back is formed of one part hope, two parts ignorance and three parts flexibility.

Every thump of the splitter ringing through the wall announces that he hasn’t got the least idea what tempus fugit means, nor yet would he believe it if I told him. He will find out, of course, eventually, but I can confidently leave that business in the hands of time itself.

Of course the only reason I was splitting wood was the onward march of time. For though it is still officially high summer you would have to be blind not to notice that the Tempus locomotive has crested the peak and is now gathering speed on the downhill run. The evenings are shortening, the ake ake is festooned with seeds and the oak tree by the vicarage is already dropping acorns.

After six decades of using the word I have this day discovered that acorn is an Old English word meaning literally oak corn, because it is the corn, the seed, the fruiting body that the tree puts out when it senses that tempus fugit and autumn is on its way.

Then five minutes ago I went to the kitchen to make tea and while the kettle boiled I watched a pair of leaves go drifting, dancing past the window, and as they lilted down I heard them whisper tempus fugit.

The starlings and the sparrows have grown up. Only a few weeks back they came as chicks to the bird table, wearing fluff instead of feathers, hopping after their parents, fluttering their stubby little wings, opening wide their beaks and waiting to be fed. It was all very coochy-coo endearing, but tempus has put paid to coochy-coo endearing pretty damn quick. Childhood lasted a month for these chicks. The infant starlings have now acquired their spangly suits and are indistinguishable in appearance from mum and dad. Mum and dad, meanwhile, have disowned them, have forgotten indeed that they were ever mum and dad, and will compete with them for food as autumn fades into the cruel surprise of winter.

The starlings, clearly, have been reading Shakespeare.

And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

Save breed ...

But they could have been reading any number of poets. Andrew Marvell, for example:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near

Or Robert Herrick:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Old Time is still a-flying

Nothing new in any of this, of course. "We are time’s subjects," said Lord Hastings in Henry IV. But, he might have added, some days it’s more obvious than others.

 - Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.