Peppa Pig Time

It was the first day back at school this morning, and we had all the usual restless apprehension in the car on the way in: half of us looking forward to the start of the year, the other half already looking forward to the end of it. Same old.

We’ve also been doing the same school run for the last five years, but that doesn’t stop one of the kids in the back asking how long it will take to get there.

I think it will take another fifteen minutes. But of course I don’t say that, because I still think I’m a funny dad.

“Three Peppa Pigs.”

And, quite predictably, three sets of eyes roll to heaven in the rear-view mirror.

For three kids growing up with an inexhaustible love for watching Peppa Pig, five minutes was never five minutes in our house. It was one Peppa Pig. Ten minutes was two. Half an hour was six.

So I would say things like: “We’re leaving the house in one Peppa Pig, we’ll be in the car for four, and we’re going to stay at the house for about ten.”

Peppa Pig was our family unit of time.

I mentioned this to a friend recently, expecting to be ridiculed. Instead he just nodded.

“Same,” he said. “Bluey, though.”

He’s a few years younger than me, and it occurred to me that every generation of families probably has its own agreed units for the passing of time. I can’t quite remember what my own childhood units were, but I suspect they might have been Thundercats, Sesame Streets, or Smurfs. I’ll need to check with my siblings later…

So Peppa Pig time is probably less unusual than it might first seem. We all invent ways of measuring time that make sense to the people around us and almost nobody else.

So amid all this profound retrospection, I think I’ve inadvertently stumbled across a couple of truths.

The first truth is that I don’t really measure my working life in minutes either.

I measure it in periods, blocks, half-terms, terms and school years (which aren’t even real years) units that mean almost nothing outside a school and everything inside one.

The second truth is that measuring time can also become a way of wishing it away.

“Only two weeks until half-term.”

“Nearly the end of term.”

“Just get through this week.”

“Not long until summer.”

Schools are particularly good at this, perhaps because our year is chopped so neatly into pieces that culminate in shared holidays. There’s always another marker just ahead of us, and if we’re not careful, an entire year can become one long exercise in getting to the next one.

I’ve caught myself doing that more times than I’d like to admit: treating whatever stretch of time I’m currently in as something to be got through rather than something actually happening.

I think this is a particularly sad truth, especially when we stop to consider what it is that we’re counting down.

My children are older now. We haven’t watched Peppa Pig for over a decade. Almost everything about our lives has changed since our Peppa Pig days: different school, different country, as well as the surprise arrival of baby Evie.

But somehow the unit has survived.

And perhaps that’s why it struck me this morning, sitting in the car on our first day of another school year, three Peppa Pigs from school, with the people I’d least like to be wishing any of this away.

Have a great year, everyone.

There are just 14,500 Peppa Pigs to go…