Freddie herself had fulfilled the one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on a very long time

Freddie had no need to depend upon her friends in the theatre. Neither did she have to dread time’s encroachments. The place could hardly get any shabbier, and Freddie herself had fulfilled the one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on a very long time. She had done so much for Shakespeare, one institution, it seemed, befriending another. Her ruffianly behaviour had become ‘known eccentricities’. Like Buckingham Palace, Lyons teashops, the British Museum Reading Room, or the market at Covent Garden, she could never be allowed to disappear. While England rested true to itself, she need never compromise.

P. Fitzgerald, At Freddie’s (1982), 53

I have spent more time actively following my cricket team’s progress than it took for Francis Drake to circumnavigate the earth

People tend to consider football fans the most passionate and committed consumers of sport on the planet, because they make the most noise and are, at times, frankly scary. But no one stops to think how many hours of the day we cricket lovers have to devote to our sport. Our games are epic in scale. Test matches – the highest, noblest form of the game, played only between a handful of the best teams in the world – can last five days. Even the one-day international, invented in the 1970s to be a faster-paced format, takes seven hours. There have been 254 England Tests since I started following them. Assuming these managed an average of three days’ play – factoring in early finishes and time lost to rain, and erring on the mean side – that’s at least 762 days of cricket. Which is a little over two years. That’s not even counting England’s one-day games, of which there have been more than 400. I have spent more time actively following my cricket team’s progress than it took for Francis Drake to circumnavigate the earth.

E. John, Following on (2016), 8

Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now

When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

E. Ferrante, tr. A. Golstein, My brilliant friend (2011), loc. 244

Time is divine – an entity to whose will man must submit

One of the most striking differences between the way of the great fathers and their children is that the latter have adopted the White Man’s idea about time. The White Man reckoned long ago that time is divine – an entity to whose will man must submit. Following a prescribed tick, one will arrive at a particular place, certain that an event will begin at that set time. They seem to say, ‘Brethren, an arm of divinity is amongst us, and it has set its purpose at twelve forty, so we must submit to its dictates.’ If something happens, the White Man obliges himself to ascribe it to time – ‘On this day, July twentieth, 1985, such-and-such happened.’

C. Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), 40