David Bouchier

The desire to make things clean and tidy in the springtime seems to be almost a biological urge, and like most biological urges, it should be resisted. Spring may be the season of renewal and new beginnings, but there’s no point in going crazy about it. The energy and optimism we feel at this time of year shouldn’t be wasted on cleaning.

While we were all busy being Irish yesterday I found time to reflect on the famous American Melting Pot, and how it seems to be melting. Soon after I first came to America, I was in Baltimore on Saint Patrick’s Day, and so I just had to see the parade. It was much like any other parade, until a marching band appeared in full Scottish highland dress, playing energetically on the bagpipes. Half of them were African Americans. The concept of an Irish African American Scottish bagpiper must be something unique to this nation, and was almost beyond the capacity of my alien brain to grasp.

It's not just your imagination: time really does move faster as we get older. Research shows that, from middle age onwards, we steadily fall behind the clock. For a senior citizen, half an hour zips by in fifteen minutes, so actual clock time seems to be moving faster and faster.

This sense of vanishing time is made all the sharper by the beginning of Daylight Saving Time. A whole hour evaporates in a flash, although it seems like only the day before yesterday when you set the clocks back for winter. 

Language is a tricky thing. I started talking when I was about 3-years-old, and I’m still talking, usually in what I believe to be English. Other people talk to me in the same language. Yet scarcely a day goes by without some kind of misunderstanding, usually trivial, about what somebody has said, or meant, or implied. Unfortunately I learned an older, more primitive version of the language and, as Oscar Wilde remarked, Britain and America have everything in common except their language, so everything is translation for me. 

We have all been the victims of proverbial wisdom, especially when we were young. A large part of the job of parenting is to bombard one’s unfortunate offspring with warnings and advice in the form of easily remembered clichés posing as absolute truths.