Infidelity for Beginners Read Free Page A

morning
that you could finally take your flip-flops off and run into the sea. If you
had’ve done that, you would’ve probably found a horrible green film covering
just about every rock and pebble. This was the local tenant and an abundant
bloke he was too. He had pretty much the whole planet to himself until about
six o’clock in the evening when the seas suddenly filled up with hundreds of
little monsters that started to eat the green film. Unfortunately for these
little monsters bigger and even more horribler monsters came along to start
eating them up, so that before you knew it you couldn’t turn around without
seeing a great big set of teeth chasing you around in circles.
    A few of the smaller monsters decided they’d had enough so
at ten o’clock that night they crawled out onto the land to escape the carnage.
Once there, they found their old green friend again – plant life –
enjoying a nice, safe peaceful existence and instantly started eating him
again.
    By half ten, all the big monsters were now up on the land
and the whole feeding frenzy was repeating itself all over again…
    Actually, you know what, this is simply too massive a time
scale too, so let’s forget about when the world formed and concentrate on
condensing life’s time scale into a 24 hour clock.
    Okay, it’s midnight again and the seas are just starting to
turn green… Actually no, that’s still too big a time scale, so let’s go back
and start it when actual proper, walking about life began.
    Six hundred million years ago.
    Hmm, you know what, I’m not even going to worry about
dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are too huge a lump of history to deal with so let’s
just talk about man.
    Scientists would have us believe that man’s been around for
a million years (that’s about two minutes to midnight on the 24 hour clock) but
to be honest if you saw one of these ‘men’ walking down the street, you’d phone
your local zoo to tell them they’d left the gates open again.
    No man as recognisable as man, has only actually been around
for about a hundred thousand years.
    Okay, so, it’s midnight again, we’re all dressed in animal furs
and Rachel Welsh is back at the cave getting passed around until someone
invents the telly. On this time scale, Jesus only showed up at quarter to
midnight and the war finished less than fifty seconds ago.
    Incredible isn’t it, when you think about it? The war, for
me, was like another lifetime ago, but in real actual species terms it’s not
even a minute old. Now that really was amazing.
    Time was amazing. Time was precious. And time was always
slipping away.
    Each of us got such a tiny little fragment of it for
ourselves, a razor thin slither of light between two great immensities of
blackness and what did we do with it? What did we achieve?
    Personally speaking, I’d used rather of lot of mine up
trying to work out what time it would’ve been when the dinosaurs disappeared if
the world’s history was a 24 hour clock (about half nine I think) when I
should’ve been getting on with Norman’s report. It was four o’clock in the
afternoon (the real four o’clock) and my desk was buried underneath dozens of
Post-it notes, each covered in drawings of clock faces, calculations,
cigarettes and Brontosauruses. Or should that be Bronosauri? I spent another
ten minutes looking it up on the internet and found to my surprise that it was
actually Brontosaurs, which made sense, before turning back to the question of
my report.
    It was now ten past four and the thought of going through
the files had become even less appealing. I’d arrived at work this morning with
the intention of having it done by the end of the day but then I’d got
sidetracked with all this 24 hour time line business right up until
mid-afternoon before realising all I was doing was putting off going through my
files.
    Miserable defeat sank through my soul as I turned my chair
to look at the jumbled bank of filing cabinets and I wondered if