Time is something we can't conceive of. 
Oh, we know it happens, that inexorable ticking, second by second, 
hour by hour, gone before we know it. 
The kind of thing we lose ourselves in...

we can't really think of it. Perhaps that's why we carry watches: 
we're attached to time. 
We can take it out and swing it about then put it back in our pockets and fool ourselves into believing we understand it when few of us can, and fewer still actually do. 

Time is ever present so we say we know what it is when all we have is a label. 

It's a very pleasant, well meaning conceit that we've all finally agreed to.

 It was only till the invention of the atomic clock we all decided what we 
were actually counting, hitherto fairly arbitarirly. 

There's 12-hour,24-hour, you can count by days or months or years, millenia if you're willing to brave the uproar over the 'non-existance' of the year zero... 

OR
(for the real pedants) argue over when we started counting at all. 
For that matter, who first noticed time? 

I mean it's not like the guy who stumbled onto fire, time won't singe your eyebrow hairs so it's hard to tell quite when you've got it down. Some people claim to tell it by the sun, or the stars but that's a gift fairly well lost by now and those that claim they still possess it tend to sound a little too airy fairy, new age fadish to me, like something you'd find in the back of the Sunday papers next to the comics.


Time is stately, more like a grandfather clock taller than tall and made from an ancient tree, like the ticking off of generations. Maybe we should start to count in people again? 

Then, instead of the year 1979, it could be known as the year uncle Billy's (that is Grandfather Max's (you know, the 
one with the funny hat in all those old photos?) grandson), little son, well not so much now being that his wife's already got one on the way) drove a peanut up his left nostril and had to be driven to St. Vincent's where several 
sniggering candy-strippers removed it after several hours in the waiting room. 

Much more memorable, don't you think?