Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I discovered, is ‘someone who is overly optimistic about how much time they have, often underestimating how long tasks will take and therefore frequently running late’.
That perfectly describes me. Caroline is punctual to a fault, often arriving early to appointments, and she finds my tardiness intensely irritating. Whenever I have to meet her anywhere – at a friend’s house for dinner, for instance – she will pretend I’m expected 15 minutes beforehand, so when I’m quarter of an hour late I will actually be on time. At one point, she became so fed up with my habit of arriving everywhere at least five minutes late that she put my watch forward by five minutes.
In my defence, I have improved over the course of our married life. When we started seeing each other in 1997, I was habitually half an hour late for everything. Indeed, the fact that she spent so long waiting for me at restaurants and bars was one of the reasons she dumped me after six months.
When I persuaded her to give me another chance two years later, my timekeeping did improve, not least because I was determined to make her my wife. But I did suffer a relapse on the first day of our honeymoon.
As a wedding present to myself, I’d bought a new Skoda Octavia vRS – about the cheapest car on the market that could reach 60mph in under seven seconds and had a top speed of more than 150mph.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in