193. When I used to play with my train set I made a train timetable because I like timetables. And I like timetables because I like to know when everything is going to happen.
And this was my timetable when I lived at home with Father and I thought that Mother was dead from a heart attack (this was the timetable for a Monday and also it is an approximation):
7:20 a.m. Wake up
7:25 a.m. Clean teeth and wash face
7:30 a.m. Give Toby food and water
7:40 a.m. Have breakfast
8:00 a.m. Put school clothes on
8:05 a.m. Pack schoolbag
8:10 a.m. Read book or watch video
8:32 a.m. Catch bus to school
8:43 a.m. Go past tropical fish shop
8:51 a.m. Arrive at school
9:00 a.m. School assembly
9:15 a.m. First morning class
10:30 a.m. Break
10:50 a.m. Art class with Mrs. Peters (In the art class we do art, but in the first morning class and the first afternoon class and the second afternoon class we do lots of different things like Reading and Tests andSocial Skills and Looking after Animals and What We Did at the Weekendand Writing and Maths and Stranger Danger and Money and Personal Hygiene.)
12:30 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. First afternoon class
2:15 p.m. Second afternoon class
3:30 p.m. Catch school bus home
3:49 p.m. Get off school bus at home
3:50 p.m. Have juice and snack
3:55 p.m. Give Toby food and water
4:00 p.m. Take Toby out of his cage
4:18 p.m. Put Toby into his cage
4:20 p.m. Watch television or video
5:00 p.m. Read a book
6:00 p.m. Have tea
6:30 p.m. Watch television or a video
7:00 p.m. Do maths practice
8:00 p.m. Have a bath
8:15 p.m. Get changed into pajamas
8:20 p.m. Play computer games
9:00 p.m. Watch television or a video
9:20 p.m. Have juice and a snack
9:30 p.m. Go to bed
And at the weekend I make up my own timetable and I write it down on a piece of cardboard and I put it up on the wall. And it says things like Feed Toby or Do maths or Go to the shop to buy sweets. And that is one of the other reasons why I don’t like France, because when people are on holiday they don’t have a timetable and I had to get Mother and Father to tell me every morning exactly what we were going to do that day to make me feel better.
Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere, like a protractor or a biscuit, you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it, but even if you don’t have a map it will still be there because a map is a representation of things that actually exist so you can find the protractor or the biscuit again. And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don’t have a timetable time is not there like the landing and the garden and the route to school. Because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth going round the sun and atoms vibrating and clocks ticking and day and night and waking up and going to sleep, and it is like west or nor-nor-east, which won’t exist when the earth stops existing and falls into the sun because it is only a relationship between the North Pole and the South Pole and everywhere else, like Mogadishu and Sunderland and Canberra.
And it isn’t a fixed relationship like the relationship between our house and Mrs. Shears’s house, or like the relationship between 7 and 865, but it depends on how fast you are going relative to a specific point. And if you go off in a spaceship and you travel near the speed of light, you may come back and find that all your family is dead and you are still young and it will be the future but your clock will say that you have only been away for a few days or months.
And because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, this means that we can only know about a fraction of the things that go on in the universe.
And this means that time is a mystery, and not even a thing, and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is, exactly. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can’t see the desert because it is not a thing.
And this is why I like timetables, because they make sure you don’t get lost in time.
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