Entry 43: in which we reflect on the passage of time

Time's a funny old thing, in the Realm, as elsewhere. I mean millions of years can pass in the course of a rather lazy afternoon; yet seconds can drag.

This is the position in which a rather unhappy Mrs G finds herself. She frets over the few tens of years that must pass before the lad returns. You might think that she could simply get some shut-eye and lo, here he would be, but I fear it's not like that when you are shadowing an entity embedded in a biological form. The timelines are locked for the duration, and one all too soon appreciates the concept of "real time".

But, I hear you ask, could she not simply go into the future and be done with delays? Well yes, of course, but this is not something that one does lightly. There is the whole relativism issue, which personally gives me a headache and which (strictly between ourselves) I have some difficultly grasping. It's the old river and bank analogy. Are you on the bank watching the river of time go forward, or are you in the river watching time bank of time go backward, and in which of those modes are you actually standing still in time? Or going forward or going backward? I fear that's what gets me.

Of course Mrs G is good with this kind of trivia, so I'm sure she would get it right, but there are other issues. For a start she would almost certainly meet herself and I fear two rather terse Mrs Gods are much, much worse that one. No sooner would one be giving the lad verbal than the other would leap to his defense. And vice versa. It is rather more than even the gormless one deserves.

Second, synchronous returns are philosophically pretty well impossible. Return a moment too soon, and you have the meeting yourself problem all over again. Return a moment too late, and you have an gap in your personal time line which is quite enough to induce existential crises.

No, the safest thing is to spread out your picnic blanket and sit on the bank waiting for the river of time to pass the requisite number of decades (or the other way round, but we've done this already. Haven't we? Just a moment ago in the past? Ha, ha, just a little cosmic joke there).

Anyway, on the assumption that annoyance must sooner or later give way to sentimentality, I think it is time for me to chuck my hat through the door as it were, to gauge how I might be received by herself.

Yes, I know what you are thinking, but there are times when it pays to softpedal a bit on the Supreme Being thing. This is one of them.