Every Second Counts

I’ve been thinking about what I said about academia/deconstruction appealing to people because you get to sit around and invent quirky titles. By people, I meant of course me.

That fancy of mine comes straight from my mother’s father, whom we called Papa, pronounced to rhyme with Napa. Mum’s mother was Nana, and it was all very pretentious for Glasgow, part of Mum’s mythology that we were French on her side rather than pure lace-curtain Irish, eaters of red lentils and sadly not black ones. In any case, Papa used to enter all the contests for jingles and slogans on the radio and in the paper. Once, he was even on a television game show called Every Second Counts and got stage fright—though with a show name like that, can you blame him?

He stood there frozen while the clock ticked and the other contestants banged on their bells and gobbled up the points, and he said not one word. He failed to answer a single question. The only prize he came away with was the one you got just for showing up, a crystal decanter engraved with the name of the show, and four matching glasses. He gave the set to my mother, and we had it for a couple of years in our rented house in Farnham, until I threw a party when my parents were out of town and one of my teenage wastrel friends stole it.

What a shame. It would be great to be able to pour myself a drink in the evening from a decanter that said Every Second Counts. The point of all this being that I’ve inherited from Papa, whose name was Joe Houston, my nerves around deadlines and my temporal anxiety in general, that sense of time draining away, and me only wanting to turn my face from it, every wee ending a reminder of the big yin tae come—and didnae Papa’s, and mah Nana’s tae, come awfy, awfy soon?

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