Tuesday 18th July

I learnt to tell the time very early.  I got a toy clock for Christmas when I was four, and apparently, I learned all the hours and minutes by Boxing Day.  I had been promised a real watch when I could tell the time – but had to wait two years for the promise to be realised.  Since then I have always worn a watch – many watches in fact, as even reasonably expensive models don’t seem to last that long.  Never had a Rolex…hahaha.  In fact one watch was a Seiko and was expensive.  But it stopped working.  The jeweler I took it to said, while shaking his head that it would cost £80 to repair. “What?” I exclaimed. “Well sir, you buy an expensive watch, you must expect to pay a lot to repair it”.  “No,” I replied “You buy an expensive watch  – you don’t expect it to go wrong”

But often when we are unsure of the future, or just how things will pan out we say “time will tell”.  In other words, it is no use worrying about things, they will happen how they will happen at some point in the future.  But is this not an abnegation of duty.  A shrugging of our collective shoulders; a sort of cop-out.  And while I am pretty certain that the World will keep on spinning around the Sun for a few more million years, I am less sure about the future success of the species known as mankind.  History is written mostly a few years after the event, but my experience is often that the History of the late Twentieth Century is not my experience at all.  There was a time when we all thought that, despite Blair pinching the song, “Things can only get better.”  It seemed that we were on an economic and social trajectory of ever increasing living standards and understanding between people.  Maybe that was just a dream some of us had (as Joni sang), but at the time it seemed real enough.  Who would have thought that the Twenty-First Century would turn out so complicated?  And of course, time will tell if this new trajectory – of the rich getting inexorably richer, of intolerance becoming the order of the day, of ignorance and greed overcoming empathy and co-operation – will continue, or if things will indeed start to get better.

But just accepting that there is nothing we can do about it (and although there often is precious little, maybe that little is still precious) we must not just wait to see what forces, seemingly beyond our control, will throw up.  We must try to shape History, and everything we do, including of course nothing, shrugging our shoulders and saying time will tell, does shape History.