Whoops!

I just found that blogger deleted one of my posts - it was the one I did about time. Shame, because I was really proud of that one. I guess that someone objected to one or more of the tracks I put on the compilation. I'm not going to get stressy about it, but I wished they had just asked me to take the music off, which I would have done straightaway. I suppose that it's easier for these people to wield a big stick than to email me or leave a comment asking to remove it.

In case anyone enjoys my ramblings, I'm putting the text back up here. You can build your own soundtrack to go with it.

It went thus...

Ever since I was quite young I have been aware of the light at this time of year, as though the rays of the Sun are absorbing the changing colour of the leaves and the World is turning a subtle shade of bronze.

I always used to feel quite sad when noticing it, but like many things which used to make me sad when young, time has brought a now quite cheerful acceptance - beside which, with three children to keep me on my toes I have less time for contemplation, and, indeed, seem to identify fewer legitimate reasons to be miserable.

This is not to say that I am not still angry about a lot of things - but things which I now tend to accept are farther from my control, now that I know I will never change the world by getting up on a stage and playing guitar fairly badly.

I've been getting quite internally agitated this week about the heaps of useless halloween tat cluttering up aisles and aisles every shop I've been into in preparation for next week's dustbin collection as it's all carted off to landfill, with the prospect of another two months trying to avoid feeling completely cynical about Christmas.

At work we receive, often several times a day, emails alerting us to 'news' about the organisation.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of the announcement of a Christmas Ball, at which guests would be greeted on their arrival by machines belching snow out into the streets, with a call for ideas as to how "we" can reduce energy consumption at work by 30%.

Not hiring machines to fill the street with snow would seem an obvious place to start, as would not printing full colour posters - redesigned each month so that the old ones can be thrown away - reminding us to switch lights (which are on automatic timers over which we have no control) off when not in use.

I would have been a great ARP warden during the war, wandering around making people turn lights off, and tellies off of standby, and closing doors... and... and...

Anyway, automatic timers brings me neatly back to the 'extra' hour we've had in bed - which, of course, is not a real 'extra' hour at all, but one merely borrowed from the spring - long enough ago for the Time Lords to think we will have forgotten about it.

When I was at school, I used to open up a newsagent's shop at the weekend.

I can clearly recall the moment of realisation on a crisp but not unpleasant Sunday morning roughly three decades ago that I had moved my clock an hour forward instead of back, and was opening the shop at half-past-three in the morning instead of the usual five-thirty.

I resolved at that moment not to make the same mistake again.

Putting together this compilation of songs on the theme of time brought home how strongly its passing is linked with regret and unhappiness, so I've gone for the upbeat as far as possible - and also put in some recordings of old clocks which I downloaded from somewhere some time ago for a reason I have now quite forgotten. I think it works quite well, but then I would say that wouldn't I!

It was intended to be 24 songs, running for precisely 60 minutes to the second. My other half told me there was a word for that beginning with "O" and ending with "bsessive", so I let it go at 25 tracks, over-running by about two-and-a-half minutes.

Hope you enjoyed it if you did download it - if I knew which track(s) had been objected to I could edit it and put it back, but that doesn't appear to be the way it works.