Mobile phones let us bounce off our environments, and I'd been thinking of that as people and places, but it must also include time, or at least the "time personalities" of the people we know.
Instead of synchronising watches we synchronise movements - "I've just passed Staley Bridge" - and time becomes the distance between us - "Ring me when you're ten minutes away."
The phrase "fluid time" reminded me of something my mate Richard, a history teacher, told me about Railway Time. Before the 1850s, towns and cities in Britain set their own local time, but this played havoc with the timetables of the newly laid railways, and they insisted on one standard time for the whole country.
This is great piece about it with a reproduction of a letter from head office to regional stations telling them to expect a telegraph transmission of the letter N each day at precisely the same time, and that they were to set their clocks by it.
"You are at liberty to allow local Clock and Watch Makers to have Greenwich time, providing such liberty shall not interfere with the Company's service and the essential privacy of Telegraph Offices, and the business connected there with."
It's heartening to think of our local connections to other people allowing us to ignore this centralised, official, industrial timekeeping.
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