What a strange thing time is, it always goes too quickly, there is never enough of it and yet when trying to recall things that have happened during the passing of time, to me, at least, it always seems like it was yesterday until you look at the date the event took place.

For some peculiar reason the thought came into my head that on 11th November of this year it will be one hundred years since the end of World War One and yet whilst it may not seem like yesterday, one hundred years ago seems an awfully long time ago.

My grandfathers took part in World War One and my father took part in World War Two and yet now we are hard pushed to find anyone who is still alive who participated in World War Two, proving the old adage, my how time flies.

My concept of time is abysmal, although it’s really only the time that has passed rather than the time that is currently happening that I have trouble with. Like most older people I am never late, mostly because I always allow plenty of time to get anywhere, unlike the youth of today who never allow enough time and rely on the fact that they have a telephone with which they can phone to communicate the fact that they will be late.

According to Wikipedia, time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future and who can argue with that.

Well it seems quite a few people would argue and have all sorts of suggestions as to what time can do. Myself I would quite like to have the ability to turn back time, not to regain my youth but to go back to the day when I first put a cigarette in my mouth and lit the damn thing.

My friends and I had gone on our bicycles to the forest and had bought some cigarettes on the way and having lit the thing I was at first taken aback by how awful it tasted, then by how dizzy it made me feel and lastly how sick it made me feel. However I persevered and over a period of time I managed to become an addict requiring eighty a day to satiate my habit.

It would be wonderful to be able to return to that day and have the guts to say “no thanks, these things are bloody awful”, however in those days when everybody smoked, peer pressure won the day.

There comes a time when your grandparents and your parents have all died, it does make you aware that you are the next one in the firing line and whilst not wishing to turn back time or stop it completely, perhaps slowing it a little wouldn’t go amiss.

Whilst accepting it will be my turn next, I am hoping that whatever I should die of doesn’t involve a long and protracted death.

I am reminded of the old joke of the fellow who said “I want to die like my father, quietly in his sleep, not like the passengers on his bus, screaming and shouting in fear of their lives”.