#07: Time

And the power of the spoken word

At my stepmum’s funeral in 2017, I read aloud the lyrics to a song called Time by Joyce Grenfell.

Grenfell was a British woman of many talents: comedian, monologuist, singer, writer and actress, most active from the 1940s to the 1970s and probably best known for starring in the St Trinian’s TV series. Many of her wittiest monologues allegedly came from stories about her eccentric socialite mother.

My stepmum loved Joyce Grenfell, but I only discovered this after she died. My dad mentioned it when we were discussing the funeral reading and how I might pay tribute to my stepmum’s wicked sense of humour—one of the things I had loved most about her. Even though I didn’t make the connection myself, the choice felt right.

Time traces a woman’s life across four stylised verses. It’s a cabaret-like piece that relies heavily on Grenfell’s speech—her pace, pitch, and timing—to carry the song’s emotional weight.

In the first two verses, time is embarrassingly abundant. Girlhood and early adulthood unfold as a series of parodied activities, from lazing, flirting, and embroidery to picnicking, dancing, and attending parties. Grenfell’s voice races through them all at top speed, the piano chasing after her. Before each verse list unfolds and ends, we hear a similar refrain:

“When I was a girl, there was always time,
There was always time to spare.
There was always time to sit in the sun;
And we were never done with
[...]
When I was a girl, there was always time to waste.
Thank the Lord.”

–

“When I was a young woman, there was always time,
There was always time to spare.
There was always time to walk in the sun,
And we were never done with
[...]
When I was a young woman, there was always time to enjoy things.
Thank the Lord.”

By the time we hit verse three, the mood has changed. The woman narrator is now elderly, and her spare time is lacking. She’s traded lazing and dancing for the busyness of domestic tasks like babysitting, shopping, and washing up.

In the final verse, the song stops running as Grenfell slows her pace to deliver a parting message:

“But now I’m an old, old woman,
So I want the last word:
There is no such thing as time—
Only this very minute
And I’m in it.
Thank the Lord.”

My voice only faltered at “And I’m in it.” Until that moment, I was standing at the funeral podium, rushing through the song’s lists just like Grenfell. Then I slowed down at verse 4, and time disappeared. I was in this minute but my stepmum was not: my stepmum, who had not lived to be an old, old woman, but who had always known there was no such thing as time. Today would have been her 59th birthday.

Circumstances notwithstanding, performing words aloud is one of my favourite things to do. It’s scary, in a good way. Unlike writing, speaking is a unique event: you can re-read someone’s words but you cannot re-experience someone’s speech; no two live renderings will ever be the same. That gives the whole exercise a special kind of weight.

I particularly enjoy speaking aloud while standing still because it limits all expression of meaning to the voice, forcing you to think even harder about the relationship between word and sound. Whenever I give a talk or emcee an event, I write my script in full and learn it by heart for this reason. People say that being able to riff on stage is a sign of competence, and that may be true; for me, internalising a speech and delivering it with intention is a sign that you respect your audience.

And there is an audience! A live one of human beings, no less. This leads me to another important distinction. Where writing is one-way, speaking is a shared act. Without listeners listening to your words, there is no speech to speak of. We need each other to bring the moment into being:

“Teller and listener, each fulfils the other’s expectations. The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Telling is Listening’, The Wave in the Mind

‘Telling is Listening’ was Le Guin’s attempt at explaining why human communication is so much more than information transmission. It helped me see oral performance in particular as something magical—a living, intersubjective act between people.

I think this is why it’s easier for words to become a part of you when you speak or hear them aloud, because you’ve absorbed them, perhaps even been changed by them, through the bodily experience of speech. I’ve never forgotten Time because those uttered lines will forever connect me to that moment of grasping my loss in a room filled with others. After I finished reading the song, the funeral congregation broke into applause and told me, without saying a word, that I was not alone.

I hadn’t thought about Grenfell’s words for years until they suddenly resurfaced last November on a trip to New York.

“When I was a girl, there was always time, there was always time to spare.”

The line was stuck on repeat in my head.

There I was, in a city where people have no time to spare, accompanied incessantly by a line about infinite time. The cognitive dissonance was almost comic. I couldn’t figure out why the song had returned then or why it had chosen New York. Fortunately, it meant my stepmum came along for the ride. I think both she and Grenfell would have enjoyed the irony of the whole affair.

A week later, back home, I discovered a new book on my desk: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’d ordered before my trip and promptly forgotten all about it. It felt fitting that Le Guin, who had taught me about the time‑bending properties of speech, was the one who led me back to Grenfell.

No Time to Spare consists of blog posts Le Guin wrote in the final years of her life. Its title comes from her piece about a fusty Harvard alumni questionnaire in which respondents had to select what they did in their spare time. Following golf at the top of the list were creative activities like writing, Le Guin’s 60-year vocation. Her response is characteristically wry:

“The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.”

Like Grenfell, Le Guin refuses to separate being from time; she cannot divide her life into meaningful and leftover hours. All things that are now are worth doing. Yet both of these women also transcend time through their use of language. Their words remain forever available for us to read and re-read, to speak aloud whenever we choose, and to be changed by them when we do.

Thank the Lord for that.

---

PS I’m switching on paid subscriptions as of today. All posts will stay free. I’m only doing this because Substack allegedly suppresses your reach if you don’t have paid enabled, so I’m trying to game its algorithm. While I don’t currently aspire to this newsletter being a source of income, I would like more people to discover it without having to sink hours into social media promotion.

If you enjoy Pass It On and would like to support it, you can subscribe with a 90% discount here. But there is zero pressure to do so! Reading the words is already more than enough.