Old father TIME

Sir Martin Marion Hilary

THE INVENTOR OF TIME

???? – 1736

In fairness to full disclosure I should really mention that the above image isn’t of Sir Martin at all – he was notoriously camera shy – even though at the time of his death the camera was still some one hundred years from actually having been invented.

Sir Martin was in fact a robust Scots man from the small Highlands town of Kinlochleven – often described by those that met him as big bear of a man and by those that hadn’t as a rather bookish and slight individual, not much is known of his early days. We do know that he came from a long line of beards – and an unfortunate combing accident in his teenage years left him with a rare alopecia that meant he could only grow hair in a small patch under his right eye that had the misfortune of coming out in the shape of a penis.

This was a shame that haunted Sir Martin all his life – not even finding peace on his deathbed, despite all of his magnificent achievements in the realms of time, he was heard to mutter his final words “why did it have to look like a penis…”

But nonethless we should be grateful that it proved to be the spur that drove him from his Scottish homestead to find a place for himself in the world. For it was that Sir Martin found himself in the year ???? freshly arrived in London and ready to make his fortune.

Now records show of course that before Sir Martin invented his concept of ‘Time’ the world was at this point in complete disarray. People didn’t know how to keep appointments, organised sports would often go on for weeks without anyone haven’t the faintest idea when to call time on them, and women were often pregnant for up four years.

Sir Martin had initially harboured some dreams of becoming a sailor – he spent many a ???? prowling the docks and banks of the Thames in the hope of being press ganged onto some long sea voyage to a far away exotic locale, invariably though he mostly suffered the ignomy of rape. But it took more than a rogering up the anus to keep Sir Martin down (he literally couldn’t sit down) and Sir Martin eventually found himself enrolled at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

Many now find it a coincidence that he should have found himself in of all places Greenwich, so close to the observatory and what would become the meridian line. But by this point Sir Martin really needed to get his story moving along, and so logic and happenstance be damned…

TO BE CONTINUED…. (tomorrow)

Tags: Alopecia, Beards, Greenwich, Inventor of time, Kinlochleven, London, Meridian Line, Sailors, Scotland, Sir Martin Marion Hilary