British Expat Newsletter: 16 November 2005

By Kay McMahon, 16 November 2005

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

• This week: Time
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Joke and quotation

This week

Time. Where does it go? By the way, we’re sorry we missed last week’s newsletter. We were in transit after a marathon visit (6 months) going through the selling up process in the UK. We’re back in the beach hut now, though, and are doing our best to catch up. So, on with the show!

How important is your time? More to the point, do you ever feel as if other people don’t value yours? I’ve come across this “my time is more important than yours” attitude quite a lot recently. Dentists (if you can get one in the UK) and doctors are a case in point. You make an appointment, you may even make a big effort to arrive on time, but invariably they keep you sitting in the waiting room for up to an hour before you are seen.

When we lived on-compound in Delhi and I had an appointment to see anyone, I would only wait for five minutes. After which I would walk out saying, “My time is too valuable to spend it sitting here. You can phone me when you’re ready.” Of course, you can only do that when you live a two-minute walk away. But still, I felt I’d made my point.

Other people seemed to think it was odd that I valued my time in this way. How about you? Do you just put up with others wasting your time or do you take action to prevent it?

Some people don’t seem to take time seriously at all. You expect this in Asia as it seems to be a cultural thing.

Social occasions are different too. In Britain it seems to be “correct” to turn up five to ten minutes late for a dinner invitation – “fashionably late”. Yet we were often perplexed in India when people would turn up ten minutes early. And we weren’t ready for them!

There are lots of sayings and proverbs about time. It waits for no man. Procrastination is its thief. And tempus fugit. Yes, doesn’t it just! This brings me back to my orginal question: where does it go? And is it really true that time goes quicker as you get older, or does it just seem that way?

I’ve always wished that the transporter beam idea in Star Trek would become a reality. Imagine no more delays or hassles at airports. I think I’d like going through a few black holes too (and I don’t mean the loft in our London house!) and exploring other time dimensions. I’m not sure where I would go. I quite fancy a trip to the time of the Raj in India. There again, I probably have a romanticised view of it, despite knowing much of its gory history.

Where would you go if you had a time machine? And why?

Does time matter where you are? Do you have anything to say about this topic, or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

This is interesting. A family photgraphs themselves at the same time every year. See how they’ve changed from 1976 up to the present day.
Zonezero.com: Time

A Walk Through Time. Here’s a site which talks you through the history of clocks and time-keeping.
US National Institute of Standards and Technology: A Walk Through Time

And finally, for a bit of fun. Don’t build your house upon sand as it won’t last. But some sandcastles may have greater longevity. These are amazing!
funnies.com: Sandcastles

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• free online virtual model of me
• cows sport venue
• babyface cricket
• toilet pepper
• invisible iks an lemon
• llanfairpwllgwyngllgogerychwryndrobwllyantsllyogogogoch (Particularly bizarre since this isn’t even the correct spelling, which is: llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch)
• seahorse spiritual
• greek vases defecation
• steal gladys kabila
• how to smoke smarties
• how do they mack monye sudan
• bamboo masturbating

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr., US author

Joke

A little old man in a nursing home walks up to a little old lady and says, “Hey, guess how old I am!”

She unzips his fly, reaches her hand in, and fondles him for a couple of minutes, then announces, “You’re 72!”

“That’s amazing! How’d you know?”

She says, “You told me yesterday!”