A Perfect Explanation

I just love this photo. It's Jeremy Clarkson, the host of that motor show I'm always on about. (Jeremy is the one wearing a hat)

This is an excerpt from one of his columns, that perfectly explains the mystery of why time seems to move faster the older you get. It also explains why elderly drivers only drive 11 mph.

If you’re five years old a year is a fifth of your whole life, which is why it seems to go on and on for an eternity. But if you’re 45 a year is a 45th of your life, which is why it passes like winter’s day in the Arctic. When you’re 45 time passes quite literally nine times faster than when you’re five. When you’re 75 time is hurtling by at such a rate that driving your small car is like plunging through a tear in the space-time continuum. The throttle pedal is a hyperspace button. This is why old people drive so slowly; because 12mph to a pensioner is like 2,000mph to a teenager. When you sit behind them at a roundabout wondering why on earth they won’t pull out, it’s because the approaching lorry that, to you, is moving at 14mph is coming at them like the Starship Enterprise on combat power. Last weekend I had the usual list of jobs. Take one child to school, drop the boy off at a rugby match, get home, take the third to her riding lesson, then get back to watch the second half of the game before picking the others up and dropping them all off again at different parties. It required military planning and certainly there was no time for the doddering old man who was crawling down the A44 in his Clio at 21mph. And nor did I have much patience with the Rover that, from behind, was apparently being driven by four wisps of white hair. I lost my temper quite badly with this one, especially when it stopped at a set of green lights on a route I use to avoid a local double mini-roundabout which, for the past four years, has been home to an old lady in a stationary Metro. Of course, so far as she’s aware, she’s only been there four seconds so she really can’t understand why everyone in her wake is so angry. What are they all doing, these old people? I thought they only ever went out on a Sunday, taking their nose hair to a local beauty spot, eating a hardboiled egg and then crawling home again.