I was looking through my old Oothangbart notebook that I used to take to work with me hoping to find a date or at least to find the year in which I first started putting the novel together. But, I couldn’t find any such thing. I guess it must be because I live so much in the moment that I always forget to record the year or month in connection with my notes for writing projects. I don’t remember things like the passing of time in my normal life, or where I was at any particular moment. If I was implicated in a murder, I’d have a great deal of trouble remembering my whereabouts at the time of the crime.
Yet, I care about time very much. I remember my continual awareness of how having to work at outside jobs took away so much time in which I could’ve been writing. In one of my last jobs in London, I thought that if I was simply allowed to get on with doing what I had to do I’d not feel so aggrieved, but there was a strong underlying pressure to get involved in the work ‘social’ culture which was of no interest to me whatsoever. And, it was in this atmosphere, that the seeds of Oothangbart began to sprout. I started to think about time and who owned it, managers and sub-managers and how they behaved, hierarchy and how it operates, and meetings and how utterly silly they can be. And fear, I thought about fear, because I sensed a lot of it amongst my work colleagues who were desperate to be recogised as conformist.
Each lunch-time in the summer, I walked down to a local park and wrote up my notes for Oothangbart, trying to be as logical as I could. I thought about things that were mechanical and ridiculous and came by the idea of the street escalator, I thought about the story plot, and the characters and the names of characters like Agnew Staggering, Donal Shaun Hercule Poseidon, Pearl Offering and her friend Elizabeth Churning, granddaughter of Aswam Churning. And I decided to invent a different system of time for Oothangbart. That was hard because I could never use phrases like ‘one day’, or ‘the following day,’ because there are no days in Oothangbart. There is, instead, the following segments of time:- Newtime, Morningstop, Trumpet Time, Slowtime, Fishthoughts, Whittletime, Rootabout, Daygone, Vespertime, although I don’t mention all of these time phases in the book. Newtime is when you wake up in Oothangbart, so I had to use that a lot, Trumpet Time is lunch time, so that’s important when you’re a worker. Fishthoughts is time to go home, and Whittletime is the evening. The most frightening time of all is Vespertime when nobody should be outside their homes. I couldn’t use words like ‘minute’, although I did use ‘moment’. In the absurd meetings they hold in Oothangbart, they have the moments of the meeting, not the minutes. These restrictions add to the peculiar and slightly quaint tone of the book. I went through the manuscript time and time again.,… that is not a pun….. to make sure that I never wrote the word ‘day’ or ‘minute’ anywhere. For those who are going to read the book, if you find I slipped up somewhere, can you let me know, and we can tear that page out and eat it.
