1. Jane Roberts said, in some of her books, that time present is time past is time future. 2. It’s a point of view I subscribe to. 3. My grandparents’ longcase clock, a dark brown wooden-cased Victorian beauty with an enchanting ivory face, disagreed with me and marked linear time all day and night long, ticking off the seconds one by one in the cold hallway of the cottage, the heavy pendulum swinging alone in the empty space. 4. My grandparents’ clock did not stop when they died. 5. I gave away the watch I got from my grandparents for my 18^th birthday. 6. The pendulum clock was invented by the Dutch horologist Christiaan Huygens in 1656. Up until the 1930s it was the world’s most accurate timekeeper. 7. Time is chopped up into seconds, which merge into minutes, hours, days, weeks and so on. 8. There is a simple link between time and our location on the globe, but this was not discovered for a long time so we never knew where we were, or when. We were all at sea. 9. When we worked it out, we chopped up the world like an orange into segments of minutes/degrees and began to rule the world with ships. 10. Because now we knew where we were and where we wanted to go. And how to get there. Along lines. Many of them straight. 11. Mum’s time ticked by on a gold watch on her wrist, the timepiece a prize for her dancing prowess. That was all she ever wanted to do. Dance. Often in circles. 12. Sometimes she wore two or three watches on her wrist at once, and they all said something different. 13. I think she was giving me a clue. 14. I never wore a watch, they always stopped working within an hour of the little brass buckle tightening the leather round my wrist. Even the digital ones. 15. Explain that I said to dad, a mechanical engineer. 16. I secretly thought it was because the watch agreed with my certainty that time runs in a circle, and folded its hands in sympathy. 17. Surprisingly, dad told me he visualises his year as running backwards in a circle, starting sometime in August. Then he showed me a gyroscope. There is a lot to think about with things that spin. 18. I really understood his version of time and thought about it a lot. 19. Jane Roberts say that to live in the moment we need to see time as a hat with a band on it, the words past, present and future written round the ribbon. She says we have to keep the word ‘present’ above our foreheads. Some of us let the ribbon slip the wrong way and find it hard to turn it back round, re-centering the word present over our distracted brows. 20. Dad showed me how to twist a ribbon of paper into a mobius strip and run a pencil in a continuous line round and round both surfaces til the line meets itself without the pencil ever lifting from the paper. 21. This too, I think, was a clue. 22. I made many mobius strips out of ribbons. 23. In Jane Roberts’ books the characters move across time a little like the pencil on the mobius strip, being in one place which is two, sometimes three places and times all at once, or more, without ever leaving the page. 24. I covet mum’s gold watch, locked away in dad’s loft, but it wouldn’t do me any good. It would hang too loosely on my wrist, like it does on hers. 25. The time was once sponsored by Accurist. Every second of it. 26. In the 3^rd century BC, Eratosthenes, chief librarian at Alexandria, was the first man to come up with the system of Latitude and Longitude. He also made the first accurate measurement of the earth’s perimeter by using people who walked with regular strides. Except they weren’t that regular. 27. Tightening up his system of longitude a bit with the accuracy of clocks, and the understanding of the world as the segments of an orange, we conquered the world by crossing it in boats or walking across continents and claiming them. The Navy defended our acquisitive adventures because it now knew where it was on the sea. 28. Jane Roberts has a helper who describes time to us by channelling answers to our questions through Jane. He has all the answers. He is from another universe or another dimension. Maybe the other side of the mobius strip, if there is another side, which there isn’t. But his ideas are very interesting. Or hers. 29. Jane’s spirit guide is called Seth. In the bible Seth is a farmer who lives for 900 years. And in this house he is my son. He’s a long way off 900. 30. Dad was an engineer in the Navy. He travelled a lot, across many seas on huge boats. He flew as well, and from the glass cockpit of a helicopter showed me a higher view of curve of the earth. 31. Because of him, I’ve always known my own latitude. 32. In the 1700s, Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy, carried Greenwich meantime, the starting point of all linear time, to the ends of the known and unknown world. Captain James T Kirk took star dates, a version of that, to the ends of the known and unknown universe. Maybe he met Seth. 33. Dad told me that longitude can be determined by an accurate measure of time, but I don’t think that works with my understanding of it. I don’t trust it, longitude, distances measured in lines of minutes. What he told me about the fixed point on the rim of a wheel when it touches the road as it travels forwards made much more sense. It’s physics. Or art. Or both. 34. If two of you walk around the perimeter of a circle, it’s impossible to say if the person in front of you is a short way ahead, or a long way behind, if you are following them, or they are following you. It’s the same with time – today is sometimes tomorrow, the future is often all there behind us. 35. Jane Roberts asks many tricky questions about the nature of our own realities based on our version of time. What she says makes my head spin. 36. One degree of longitude is a distance of 4 minutes. Or 69 miles. 37. In one year there are 525, 949.2 minutes. Dad and I worked out that 15 years, the time that has whizzed round since mum died, is 7889238 minutes. Nearly 5 and half thousand times round the globe, right back to the same place every time. For him, the cupboard by his bed, for me at the top of the stairs, both of us seconds away from her. 38. Despite her understanding of time, Jane Roberts gave into the linear version of reality and hopped off this mortal coil. 39. Her book is next to Steven Hawkins Brief History of Time and a book about woodwork, something else dad taught me. 40. I lent one of Jane Roberts’ book to dad. A long time later he gave it back.