LIKE most people I guess, I’m losing track of time. One of my favourite quotes, often used by me at work is from Douglas Adams, who wrote the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, He said, “time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so”.

Not only am I losing track of which day of the week it is (yes, I’m late filing this column), but even the hour of the day eludes me. As we enter week three of lockdown time seems to both slow down and speed up. But that cannot be, time runs at a constant rate surely?

Well time is a tricky thing. It behaves and does not behave as we would expect it to and philosophers over many centuries have grappled with the idea of time. Is it linear can it only move in one direction from past to present to future and, of course, the idea of time travel has filled many books and spawned countless films and TV series.

The basic idea of time seems to be rather simple and self-evident. We think about it in relation to the Earth’s position relative to the sun and the Earth’s rotation. We have devised some neat ways of describing time as seconds, minutes, hours, days then weeks, months, years. We divide the years into seasons. Everything seems to work, like clockwork.

There are some anomalies, leap years, leap seconds, uneven months and even, over the centuries, changes to the calendar which reset dates. But time marches on, as they say.

Yet at present our concept of time is being tested by a sudden and abrupt change to our way of life. Schools are closed so the school year is disrupted. We have an Easter weekend coming up, but many have been on an enforced vacation for weeks. Others of us are working, but from home which leads to a strange change in routines and timings.

Our key workers, especially those in the frontline dealing so admirably with this crisis are seeing not more free time, or of being at a loss trying to entertain themselves – for them time is very elastic.

The eight-hour shift becomes 12, the days seem longer, when in a crisis and every second counts, the seconds seem much shorter.

How we perceive time is very personal. And that’s all we have, a perception of time. Time does not exist as a substance we can look at, feel or observe through a microscope. We measure it using clocks and some of our clocks can measure extremely small intervals of time. It does not exist as an entity, but it still passes.

Einstein developed theories of relativity. According to these theories there was a point before which time did not exist. That point was the “big bang”. All of space, time and matter was condensed into a single point – a singularity. When that point began to expand all matter came into being and time began. We think that happened about 13.7 billion years ago. Before the singularity began to expand, there was no space, no matter and no time. These sort of concepts and ideas to many people, myself included, sound irrational and trying to understand them is very difficult.

Time is also related to motion. Einstein carried out thought experiments related to how time changes for people travelling at different speeds. For an astronaut travelling at high speed away from Earth, time will pass relatively more slowly than for the rest of us on Earth.

If the astronaut had a twin, depending on the speed and length of journey they would age differently. This is an effect called time dilation.

It’s not a perception of time but a real effect. The astronauts travelling in the space station are subject to this effect, but six months in space only slows down their ageing by about 0.007 seconds.

Coming back to how we are experiencing lockdown, time is probably our greatest friend and our worst enemy.

While many of us are spending more time with family which at first may seem great, not all families and relationships are good. We’ve seen domestic abuse calls rise and no doubt family arguments have increased. Time and space (and here I don’t mean Einstein’s time space but literally space between individuals is crucial.

While we are practising social distancing, within a cramped house or flat with no outside space, this can be a real hardship.

It’s vital to stop the spread of the virus that we maintain social distancing and practise good hygiene with handwashing and so forth.

It will, ironically, take time for the virus to be destroyed through its lack of transmission.

Time is a funny old thing, it’s either too much or too little, but never – just right.