All The Time in the World

That's how it felt once upon a time, didn't it?  Every weekend lasted a month, every half term holiday felt like a year and as for the six week summer break - well, sometimes I actually thought I'd DIE through sheer boredom.  How could something with the words Holiday and Summer in it be so interminably dull?  Of course these days there're Playstations and Facebook and Kindles and recreational drugs to be filling the time in with, but back then?  Entirely different story.

I'm surprised I didn't self-combust or implode with the sheer monotony of the summer holidays.  I can still 'feel' the massive sighs that used to wrack my teenaged, slouched torso and made me sag lifelessly from living room, to kitchen and back to the bedroom ad nauseum.  I'm now not surprised I threw my mother into a mid-life menopausal monster with the amount of "I'm sssssoooooo bored"'s I must have flung at her on a daily basis.

"Go and draw me something" she'd say.  And I'd momentarily be flummoxed.   Really? Mummy wants me to draw her something?  Oh goody.  What should I draw?  What would she like me to draw?  What really good drawing could I possibly draw for her?
Having no idea what kind of anything my mother liked - like, EVER - I would invariably never know what I should draw for her and so I'd sit sucking the end of my 2HB wondering if she'd like flora or fauna, building or landscape, portrait or still-life.  Eventually I'd do what I always did and infuriate her further with a: "Muu-uuuummm?  What should I draw?"

So I'd end up doing the one thing I always ended up doing; watching ants in the garden.  Wondering what they were thinking.  IF they could think and if they could think, then wondering if they had names and families and what their homes looked like under the earth and if they had the ant-equivalent of furniture and shops and jobs.  I'm a little surprised I never actually ended up being an Ant-iquarian with the unhealthy amount of ant-based interest I amassed during my formative years.  And when my brother dropped his heavy boot on my little project, I'd become even more fascinated as I watched the little ants race about in astonished circles crying "oh my god, Dave's just been squished, quick, send for the Ant-bulance" (in my head, anyway) and then I’d be absolutely awe-struck as they overcame their confusion and rallied around Dave, lifting him high above their little ant-heads and off to the nearest operating theatre in their burrow/hive/warren.  Actually, I’m not sure if I read it or dreamed it or saw something on the telly but I did hear somewhere that the ant kingdom is the only other species in the world that can perform life-saving surgery on their own kind.  [Bearing in mind this information is brought to you courtesy of a fairly overactive imagination, feel free to disregard this idea as totally insane.  Which is how it looks to me now I’ve written it down].

Those ant years I’ll never get back.  And the time I spent watching those manic little insects rushing about over and through and under the mounds of dry soil in our back garden I shall never see again.  Were they wasted hours? Could they have been hours better spent doing something constructive – like the vastly superior-of-mind-ants were doing before my very eyes?  I don’t know.  But I’ve never forgotten the feeling of being so desperately bored out of my skull that I was happy to sit on a warm garden path with ants (very nearly) in my pants, waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen.  I never knew what and I never dared even ask what in case it upset me to hear the answer.  But I do remember that back then, knowing that I had all the time in the world felt like a painful, horrible torture of mind-numbing proportions and now…. well, it worries me that I don’t have that luxury anymore and sometimes I feel a bit like Dave must’ve done seeing the shadow of my brother’s Doc Martin looming ever-closer.
So, I'm guessing if Tempus Fugit, then Carpe Diem...