Time: what stops everything happening at once. Or ever.

[desperance]

As the tasks finally dwindle, the time available runs out, even as time required builds up for the remaining tasks. Aaargh. The dash to Walgreen's took me more than an hour, what with standing in three lines and having to wait twenty minutes betweentimes. (NB to self, pharmacists have the patience of saints, and you should be more appreciative; also, that guy couldn't really have been called Roger Sir Toenail, but that is what I heard him say. Twice. [Brian-the-pharmacist may have heard the same thing, as he did ask him to repeat it])

I have decreed that it is now Wine O'Clock, whatever the timepiece actually is reading. And I need to proof more pages, more and more.

Here, have a darling. This is the opening of "'Tis Pity He's Ashore" (a pun I actually perpetrated as a schoolboy, and held close for almost forty years before I had a chance to use it):

“Sailor Martin. You should not be here.”

The voice came from the tangle of shadows in the back of the shop. It was
salt-abraded, familiar, unchanging. Live long enough, go far enough, you will find
those things that never change: the places, the people, the truths.

Not many of them, and not all are welcoming or welcome, but still: they
stand like islands in the sea, islands in the storm.

Johnnie was, is, always will be one of those. Johnnie calls himself a chandler,
and that’s as dishonest as he’s ever been. Johnnie sells much that came from the
sea, but nothing that’s useful to a sailor, nothing that any boat should ever want
or need.

Johnnie and I, we’ve got history. He likes to say I’m his best customer.
Sometimes I think I’m his only customer. The shop is a collection, more a museum
than a place of exchange. The only trade is inward. Johnnie loves to buy, if a thing
is rare or dark or strange enough; he hates to sell. Except perhaps to me.

“You should be afloat,” he said. “Stood well off, in deep water. Bad weather
coming.”

I knew it, I could feel it: a tension all through the city from harbour to
highrise, a breathless unease, a readiness. Not only for the typhoon in the offing,
though that was the reason I’d put in. Any other trouble I preferred to meet at
sea, but delivering a billionaire’s new yacht to KL, I thought I’d best not turn her
up storm-toss’d.

“What do you hear, Johnnie?”

“I hear everything. You know this.”

Of course I knew. The true question was what do you believe?—which of course
he would never tell me, and I could never believe him if he did.

This was how we dealt with each other, in hints and doubts and rumours.
It was how he dealt with everybody. Even his name was not Johnnie. That was
a joke, perhaps, or several jokes. Surabaya Johnnie for obvious reasons; Rubber
Johnnie because he always bounced back; Johnnie-come-lately because he had
been here on this waterfront, in this store for ever. I could attest to that.

For a man his age he was still robust, still unrepentant, and some of his teeth
were still his own. The cracked and ancient ivories, those few. The gold ones,
mostly not: he mortgaged them at need. A man needs negotiable wealth, and his
stock-in-trade won’t serve if he will never agree to sell it. I held lien over one of
those teeth myself, from the last time I’d touched port.

“Go back to sea,” he said, “sailor.”

I shook my head. “Not until the storm blows over.” That, or something other.

“Well, then. Come here. I have a thing for you.”