... and yet we do more in each passing minute.

I remember Sundays just a few years ago, when the day took forever, and all we did was make love, read the paper and find some food.

A Sunday now starts early, with fresh-brewed coffee, making breakfast for the children, shopping, washing, cleaning, church, chatting, helping out the school parents’ association, balancing budgets, noding, taking the children to a party or a class, My goodness, it’s 2pm and we haven’t even had lunch and cooking and eating and helping with homework and mowing the lawn and trimming the fruit trees and mending the lawnmower and fixing the shelves in the bathroom and now its time to get the children ready for bed and cleaning their teeth and reading to them and ‘Dad can I have a glass of water?’ and paying the bills and noding and good grief, bedtime already? Where did the day go?

Sleep. Blessed sleep. And suddenly we are going on a summer break, but surely Christmas was only last week, and in that time we have planned and built a kitchen extension, found a new school for our younger child, run a couple of events for the school, written and edited a magazine for my alma mater, watched the Brownie promise and helped on school trips and visited half a dozen countries, and written a few nodes and upvoted and paid the credit cards and eaten meals and cooked barbeques and attended concerts and visited family and friends and hosted them back and gone to funerals and comforted ageing relatives and fixed a million minor problems and fought the local council over parking and bought presents for a hundred people and sent cards and done the charity bit and fixed the computer and the freezer which broke at a bad time and serviced the car and cleared out the loft and filled it again and sold the baby things and re-surfaced the driveway and researched some life insurance and WTF? Another year gone?

It’s my life. Mundane. Of this world. All those things take up time and more time, and suddenly all that time we once had for doing cool things gets swamped by the stuff we have to do and the stuff we choose to do. It just means getting up earlier, and going to bed later, and never quite stopping.

That is where the minutes, hours, days and years go. And if a year seems to pass quicker than a wink, console yourself with the thought that you are doing more than you ever imagined possible when every minute seemed like a year.