So there’s this thing I do now where at points, I cannot do anything — not work, read, anything — and instead just have to sit there watching the minutes tick by. Then there’s this totally separate thing – wait, I can tell you this one: on Thursdays I produce the AppleInsider podcast. That means I have a conversation for about an hour, and then immediately hear that whole hour’s conversation all over again.

Usually at twice normal speed.

And then there is this. It’s March. We’re two complete monthsS into 2024 and I don’t feel as if I’ve started the year yet, plus I definitely haven’t finished enough, and yet time is zooming by –

Hang on, there’s another one. Maybe two weeks ago now, I was interviewed for BBC CWR about a thing. Just a fun couple of minutes, but unusually for me, it was a pre-record and I don’t know when the segment plays out. Since I appear to have an ego the size of something someone cleverer than me would’ve said now, I would like to hear it. Consequently every few days, I zoom through the BBC iPlayer recordings of the show and am prepared to be whisked back to when I recorded it. So far I never am, I haven’t heard myself, but I have had chance to hear a lot of great music. Also a really interesting thing about needles.

I cannot finish the novel I’m writing. There. I’ve said it.

To date I have thrown away at least 80,000 words of it, sometimes because they are crap and it’s about time I was writing better, but otherwise because it’s so clearly constantly on my mind that I should be better at writing about time. You know how it is when a character does something in chapter 7 that changes what they did in chapter 1 and you think that’s fine, until you realise it makes a pigs’ ear of chapters 10 through 31. That’s the thing.

I need to stop thinking about time and instead think about time. There. Thanks: it helped talking to you about this. And I believe our 50-minute hour is up already.