The other day, I was asked to be the time-keeper for a 100m race. Now, thankfully for everyone involved, this did not actually come to pass. I say thankfully because I can get a Tassimo to stop working just by standing next to it and it has exactly one button.

However, my initial response was not gadgetry related (and the stop-watch the PE person showed me looked to have at least more than one button), but more to do with being vaguely disconnected from time at the best of times.

Right now, I am sitting watching songs from the 90s on some music channel or other. These songs are all from roughly the same time period and yet, in my head, some of them are recent and some are from the distant past. I seem to group songs, as I do so many things, by strands of events. Some, like the Shania Twain song I am listening to during this paragraph, linked to my visit to Durham in the very last years of the 90s. Others are linked to being a kid at secondary school.

This covers a short period of time, really. I visited Durham at the end of my second year at Uni. As far as my highly subjective view of things goes, however, there is a massive gap between school and University, even though adult-me thinks five years ago was yesterday.

I'm not sure I really have a point here, except that time is an illusion.

At a recent wedding, I spent some time chatting about time with another guest. Never met him before. He seemed nice. We played a game of some sort which involved throwing a shiny ball at a less shiny ball on a lawn. I won. This is rare, so I enjoyed it. On the whole, it was a good time. At breakfast the next morning, we got into physics. I am assuming this is something to do with his job, but I don't really know. Let's just say it is. He was talking about the theory that time does not exist, and that each slice of 'time' is a different arrangement of atoms and so forth and not really continuous from the one we perceive as coming before it.

I would like to point out right now that I am not a physicist, in case you had been fooled. I cannot do the maths on these things. I do tend to take well to the stories I am told, but you could tell me a different story and I could believe that one just as well. In any case, the concept behind these things, as related to me in layman's terms, generally make sense. Of a kind. I have no trouble deciding every instant is a separate, unrelated slice.

How does this fit with my comments on songs? Apart from to say, 'Time, eh? Tricky thing,' I am not quite sure.

I am also not quite sure about how I just punctuated that sentence, but I am blaming the glass of rather good wine from a bottle we got at the recent Good Food Show and on the fact that it is nearly 1am where I am.

Perhaps I am wandering around near the idea that time is deceptive. We can measure it and corral it into days and weeks and decades, but we experience it in spurts. Any memory I have will be a chain of linked events, and I can easily separate some event which does not seem to fit and think it happened at a completely different time.

Hey, you know what? Time, and the ability to play with it, is, in a way, linked to my story in the RASSSA anthology. So, there's that.

I may play with it in other stories. It fascinates me. How can it not? We are bound by it, it is supposed to be something which marches ever on, unstoppable, but it is so fractured and prone to manipulation and shifting.

It's almost as tricky as memory, and words.

For now, I will go and watch The Backstreet Boys and pretend it is...a few years ago.