pumpkinstrokemarrow

During the return from the same expedition, came across a horde of young people from Therfield School in Leatherhead, that well known London overspill town near us. Or, to be more precise, got into the railway carriage in which they were going home. They seemed to be at the jolly stage of inebriation, although one pale young lady was having a meaningful discussion with the waste bin by the door. Others appeared to be rather under-dressed considering the temperature outside. It seems that 250 or so of them had been at a birthday party on a boat. I wondered how many of the 250 would be found at various times, dropped off at various places along the route between the boat and Leatherhead. I managed to avoid being joined into a dance by waving my crock stick, fortunately thought to be sufficient excuse.

Woke this morning to a reverie about the seven time lords. These are the chaps who are in charge of the seven observatory like buildings - there is one on Mount Teide in Tenerife (http://www.iac.es/) - who are responsible for maintaining time on earth. The first drill is that the difference between the first time and the last time among the seven times from the seven time lords must not be more than seven millionths of a second; any more than that and red lights start flashing and alert levels start climbing. Ministers of Time all over get got out of bed. The second drill is that anyone on earth must, in normal operation, be able to receive timing signals from at least three of them, thus allowing a bit of room for maintenance and accident. Any self respecting computer centre will invest in at least two sets of the equipment needed to receive such signals and will thus, almost all the time, be able to put proper time stamps on the transactions it is processing, usually in concert with other computer centres with the same facility. This way the free world keeps afloat, with the free world being so connected these days that any break in time service will very rapidly turn into disaster if not strife.

So although the business of being a time lord is really fairly mundane, would only just about attract tenure in the senior civil service in the ordinary way of things, in practise it gets a boost of several grades, reflecting the big place of time in critical global infrastructure. They get fancy dining rooms and lots of very important meetings in very nice places. The facilities themselves are discrete - like that in Tenerife - and do not advertise their core business. There is also plenty of discrete protection, both the physical and the Khyber sort.

With a bit more energy, one could bang out a whole thriller about the business. Either a solemn one or a spoof one, as the mood takes one. Or even a scientific one, going into the cracks in the time transmission part of the special theory of relativity. Do a Dan Brown on it. So he had better watch his back.