Mark Andrews: We do we waste this precious commodity?
Confession time. Last week I did something I don’t do lightly. It will come as a surprise to those who know me well, and I hope they don’t think too much less of me as a consequence. All I will say was that my behaviour was completely out of character, and it is something I probably won’t be repeating for a while.
Yep, I dusted down my passport and went to Birmingham.
As a Black Country lad, I’m not in the habit of visiting the Second City. It all seems very strange and daunting, going to a city where everybody speaks like Amy Turtle and where they exhibit all those weird metropolitan mores.
Actually the passport checks were a figment of my imagination, but you can’t be too careful these days, with all the talk about Northern Ireland backstops and Scottish independence. But the downside of not going through passport control was that I arrived earlier than expected, which brought its own unique set of problems.
My suspicions were confirmed when I pulled into a parking space at 7.10pm, and discovered that parking charges were in place until 7.30pm. Now some people may think I’m tight, but there’s no way I’m giving Birmingham Council £3.50 for an extra 20 minutes. So I did what any self-respecting Black Country mon would do when confronted with exorbitant parking charges in a strange town. I spent 20 minutes driving around in circles until the free parking kicked in.
Now I'm not sure how that plays with the council’s plans for a clean-air zone in the city centre, but if the ruling classes get greedy, these sort of things are bound to happen.
Actually, my battles with the parking wardens are not confined to occasional visits to The Big City. Over the years it’s become something of a hobby of mine, researching all the hidden backstreets where there are no charges in place. Sometimes the restrictions are so watertight there is no choice but to pay and display, but nowhere is is written that you have to make the traffic warden’s job easy. Which is why I like to plaster my windscreen with 13 assorted pay-and-display tickets, with a couple more lying loose on the dashboard for good measure. Yes, I always pay the correct fee, but if the council is going to take my money off me, the wardens are going to have to earn their corn. A friend of mine, who drives a rather tall vehicle, tells me he always posts his pay-and-display ticket top centre of the windscreen to make life hard for the vertically challenged wardens. Any other tips gratefully received.
Anyhow, I digress. The reason for sharing with you my misadventures in the metropolis is not to moan about the injustices of local authority parking policy or to share my one-man war against traffic wardens. It is to reflect on how wont we are to waste the one commodity we can’t replace. Time.
Now I always find autumn a rather disheartening time of year, when the clocks go back, each day gets shorter and each morning gets colder. I love the spring, when the sap is rising, the green shoots forming, and when those cheeky sunny days become that bit more frequent. In simple terms, spring is the time of year when life appears to be on an upward trajectory, when you look forward to the summer. Autumn, on the other hand is when the good times are behind you, the moment in the calendar when you are furthest away from the sunshine. And when I have a tendency to wish away the days until April.
It is something that probably most of us are guilty of. How often, towards the end of a football match, do supporters of the winning team start begin whistling for the referee to call time on the game? Think, you pay serious money for your tickets, more money to park the car and more still to buy a programme. Then you spend the final 10 minutes in a state of nervous paralysis wishing the game was over. Okay, as a Villa fan there have been plenty of games where I have been longing for the final whistle, but that is for a very different reason.
We count down the days to our holidays, to important events, to retirement. Children impatiently look forward to Christmas and birthdays, but all any of us are really doing is wishing our lives away. We stare at our clocks and watches in anticipation, when all they are doing is bringing us, stroke-by-stroke, closer to our date with the Grim Reaper. Metaphorically, we are driving our cars round and round in circles in a strange city, in the vain hope that eventually there will be something better around the corner.
So from here on in, I’m going to make it my resolution to be grateful for each day, to squeeze the last drop out of every bit of precious time I am lucky enough to be given. Because time is like the special offers in the bargain bins at the supermarket. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
