Oh dear — poor Jonathan has had a bit of a time of it. We'll leave him to explain more.
After almost half a century of banking with them, originally with Coutts & Co and latterly with NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland is, for what it is calling ‘commercial reasons’, forcing me to close my accounts. In recent years, its service has been so dismal that, despite the nuisance of having to switch, in reality, it is doing me a favour.
Although, claiming to be desperate to get rid of me, it is taking them forever (a case of ‘Bank Holds Up Man’) to organise. Indeed, the frustration I felt after this morning’s call (67 minutes I’ll never get back), a failed attempt by me to arrange the last transfers, was such that afterwards I bolted out of the house with a view to clearing my head.
I was in such a fury that it was fully an hour before I came to my senses and started to take in my surroundings. I had walked inland and was in a part of our neighbourhood I have barely explored before. Seeing some ruins in a field, I climbed a wall to take a closer look and found the remains of what I am guessing must have been a copper mine. There was a tumbledown engine house and several poorly fenced-off holes. No voice of reason (Rose’s, for example, or our daughter Charlotte’s) being there to advise against it, I wriggled on my stomach to the edge of one shaft and peered into the abyss.
It was a strange, unworldly experience seeing the bands of soil and rock stretching away into the inky darkness. I felt as if I were looking into the past, down through the Tertiary, Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic periods to the Upper Palaeozoic Era, perhaps 355 million years ago, when most of the landscape around here — granite and sandstone — was formed. A sort of temporal, as well as physical, vertigo. Anyway, it certainly put the wasted hours wrestling with my-soon-to-be-former-bank into perspective.
“Time can be spent and saved, wasted and killed. We keep it and we lose it. According to the Oxford dictionary, it is the most used noun in the English language”
The only geology book I can recall reading was Annals of the Former World, which won a Pulitzer in the 1990s, and pretty much the only thing I can remember from it is the term ‘deep time’ to differentiate human time from the thousands of millions of years since the universe was formed. In 1599, Shakespeare wrote: ‘The poor world is almost six thousand years old’, which was the prevailing opinion at the time. James Hutton, the 18th-century naturalist, came closer to the truth when he said: ‘We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’ It wasn’t until the 1950s that anyone came close to the truth (about 4.6 billion years).
I have always struggled to understand time. It can be spent and saved, wasted and killed. We keep it and we lose it. According to the Oxford dictionary, it is the most used noun in the English language. In Hinduism, time is God. Buddhists believe it’s a manmade concept. Perhaps, as Einstein says, it is irredeemably connected to space and maybe, as space can be bent, so can time.
Calmed by these gnomic thoughts, I cautiously got to my feet, picked a tiny bunch of wildflowers (blue butterwort, campion, orange hawkweed and red clover, since you ask) and headed home to mix myself a stiff drink and re-try the bank.
Charles Baudelaire once said: ‘So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.’ I’d offer the same advice to anyone dealing with an annoying bank.
