My sense of timing is getting sharper with age.

When I was a child I vividly remember that I had no idea whatsoever of how much time was passing. I could read for five minutes and find an hour had passed, or I could sit and wait in a waiting room for a million years and discover it had only been ten minutes.

These days I'm better at it. Of course time still seems to move faster when I'm enjoying myself, but experience has taught me how to anticipate and correct for that and I'm generally not too bad at guessing how long things have taken and how much time is passing. I test myself every so often: when someone asks me what the time is, I guess what I think it probably is before I look at my watch. I'm usually somewhere within 20-30% of the right answer in my estimate of how long it's been since I last knew what the time was.

It's more than that, though. My time sense seems almost uncannily accurate in particular circumstances. For example, I have digital countdown timers in the kitchen which I use when I need to leave something cooking for (say) ten minutes before coming back to it. So I'll set one of these timers, go into the lounge and read a book for a bit, and then at some point I'll find myself looking up and thinking ‘Shouldn't that timer have gone off by now? Perhaps I forgot to start it’. So I'll get up and walk towards the kitchen to check, and I could swear that about half the time the timer will go off as I'm in the process of going to check on it.

Of course this could be something I've convinced myself of by the usual means humans use to believe in improbable things (including but not limited to the supernatural): remembering the times it worked and forgetting the times it failed, that sort of thing. I freely confess that I haven't done a genuinely controlled test of any kind to see whether I'm right about this. All I know is that I'm normally pretty sceptical about such things and it feels statistically significant, and in particular I'm certain that ten years ago I wouldn't have been able to get that close to the mark even one time in fifty.

I'm reminded of this by what just happened at work, which was definitely just a silly coincidence. I just flicked Evolution over to calendar mode, because it had just occurred to me that I remembered a meeting being scheduled quite a while ago and it was probably about time for it this week. Sure enough, there was the meeting on my calendar, and in fact it's this afternoon. And one second after I clicked Calendar, a reminder window came up telling me that the meeting in question was in fifteen minutes' time :-)

I'd better stop waffling now and go to the meeting, in fact…