SUNDAY NIGHT TIME-TRAVEL

Something odd just happened. I was walking home from work, looking forward to the weekend and dreaming about life. I sat here in this chair, full of the joys of a Friday, blinked... and somehow it's Sunday night.

This is probably my least favourite form of time travel: the time-flies-blink-and-you'll-miss-it-carpe-diem-whizzbang-whistle-stop rocket trip through the ever-shortening hours. Yes. Worst of all, at the end of this fairground flip-and-roll between Friday and Sunday nights... is the undeniable fact that the whole ride can only ever be followed by a Monday.

I don't want to sound cliché but sometimes Mondays demonstrate a very different form of time-travel. Now I quite like a Monday in general - it's clean and fresh like sheets out of the laundry cupboard or a glistening teapot. However, it would be daft to think that it elapses in the same time frame as a weekend.

Einstein knew it. All that talk of clocks on trains - it was a thinly veiled metaphor for the fact that time speeds up in the last two days of the week; when you're on-board that train, when it's hypothetically steaming at close to 3x10⁸ metres per second and the drinks trolley comes round, that's when time itself contracts with each popping second of the onboard clock.

Meanwhile, on the track, the workers look a little glum as the weekday minutes ache past. He knew what it was all about, old Albert. On Mondays, time expands like an inflating balloon.

As you know, a Sunday night has its own little rituals here. We've had the Dustbin Conversation and the sacred Countryfile Five-Day Weather Forecast. We've tackled the weekly (and unchanging) discussion of Who is Getting up When. I've even sat through Call The Midwife (with headphones on, tapping away on my laptop). I thought it might be fun to predict at what point in the programme we get treated to a red-faced woman straining on a 1950s bedspread while concerned-looking old-fashioned midwives bustle about with aluminium pans and floral blankets. 37 minutes. For reasons I can't quite understand, my Mum loves that show. The first time I saw it, it put me off my tea.

Now, as the washing machine enters its final cycle (and the shirts I forgot to wash last week get flung about in a whirlpool of water and suds) it seems like time is once again, grinding into its usual weekly descent into slow-motion. Maybe the slower it goes, the more work I'll get done.

Funny how it doesn't quite work like that.