What if the 60s were just the early 80s and the 90s were the very late 50s? How does this thing called ‘time’ work and when is it suitable to break off a slice and call it a decade? Here a quick guide to time…
Tick, tick, tick, seconds may be small but these are the worker ants in the society of time, look after the seconds and the minutes look after themselves.
Minutes…these bruisers don’t like to be kept waiting, though more patient than their frenetic and tiny pal ‘Mr. Second’, get 60 of them together and the collective noun is an ‘hour’. Think of the big hand on a clock as the shepherd’s crook herding the 60 recalcitrant minutes into an hour, which, in turn, are packaged into groups of 24, known as days. ‘Days’ work best when ordered sequentially to avoid confusion. To aid this it was necessary to appellate the 7 days – Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful, Doc, Dopey and Sneezy (this was later revised due to the Dwarfs act (1924).
A question often asked is what is a ‘date’? A date is quite simply the ‘footprint’ left as we walk through the sands of time, only when enough time is packed into ‘days’ is the weight sufficient to produce a ‘print’. These can then be transferred onto calendars (a primitive type of paper watch). Calendars have a maximum of 12 pages (or months) and ‘dates’ are sprinkled more or less evenly over each page. When a suitable coverage is achieved the total should amount to exactly 1 year.
Today, calendars are stacked according to BS Safety Standards to a maximum of 10 units before becoming unstable. These stacks are known as decades, the word decade is derived from ‘decadent’ named after the individuals who first flouted the rules, stacking calendars ever higher in reckless abandon while cranked up on laudanum and absinthe. These 'decadents' soon realised that temporal probity is the only road to salvation and the decade was soon fixed at it wholesome present day value of 10 years.
