Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time - Tapa dura

‘Time-measurement is everywhere; deadlines, pingers on cookers, clocks squatting on computer screens. The pips of time are spat out at you by the radio – and if these are the pips, where is time’s fruit? To live in such an overwound, overclocked present is to live not in the fullness but the emptiness of time.’

An enthralling, vibrantly written and thought-provoking examination of the Zeitgeist.

An infectiously enthusiastic and original piece of cultural analysis on the one subject that has ousted sex and money from the top of the obsessions league. In thrillingly ebullient style and with every paragraph fizzing over with smart ideas smartly expressed, livewire polemicist Jay Griffiths takes Time in her teeth and champs and chews at it until it’s a far more palatable item – something to nourish us, not just to tempt and worry us.

Her fascinating exploration of the passage of time includes (among many other things): our obsession with speed, with overtaking; motorways and their link to fascism; war; Mercury and the mythology of time and speed; History and the heritage industry; the ‘meanness’ of Greenwich Mean Time; the fast language we now have to go with fast food; Aboriginal Dreamtime; the difference between festivals and pageants; May Day; New Year; fin de siecles; the Millennium Dome; the time-consuming nature of housework; sex as anti-authority and anti-linear time; male concepts of time set against female; plastic surgery and the denial of aging; the evolution of the global calendar and clock; clock time versus wild time.

At once playful, political and passionate, she discusses Time’s arrow/domain/passage/gender/ linearity/circularity/speed/sloth/etc with exceptional elan. It all makes for a hugely entertaining, exciting and even terrifying book which marks the beginning of a significant writing career.