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British Pandemic Time
This weekend, British Summer Time will end once again and the clocks will go back one hour. But in 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, has time ceased to mean anything at all?
At the beginning of Easy Rider, sitting astride his distinctive chopper motorbike, Peter Fonda pulls off his wristwatch, looks at it disdainfully, and then tosses it into the desert. The watch symbolises ‘the man’, the restrictions that society imposes, division and regulation of daily life and experience — everything that the Woodstock generation opposed. As Fonda and Hopper rev their bikes and roar onto the highway, Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild begins to play as the new anthem to that freedom.
I remembered this scene the other day as it occurred to me, as the clocks will go back this weekend, that I haven’t worn my watch for seven months.
Like millions of others across the country I have been working from home. This doesn’t mean that I have been freed from the daily schedule, in fact I have been careful to maintain a home/life balance. I get up at the same time every work day, I log on during office hours, take scheduled breaks. But when all my work is done on and through a computer, I don’t have to check the time to go to meetings, I don’t have to watch the clock to ensure that a meeting will end on time. Outlook gives me my calendar, tells me when to open a meeting and…
