Ian McMillan: Time for a column you can set your watch by

So I went to Geoff's and sat down in his comfortable hairdresser's

chair and asked him how long it had been since my last visit; he

touched the back of my neck with his expert Brylcreem-pickled finger ends and announced, triumphantly, "Two-and-a-half weeks!" I asked him how he knew. He gave a wise barber's smile. "It's the hairs just here" he said, prodding. "They grow at a certain rate. It's just something you learn…"

I was amazed. Here was a new way to measure time, a bit like dating a tree from its rings. The Back of the Neck Clock. What time is it? Ten past your last snip! What year was it when Uncle Frank's braces snapped at the Featherstone Rovers game? It must have been that time when his neck was as furry as a fox's after old Scissors Stevens collapsed and his salon was shut for six weeks. Ah yes: 1987. March.

Of course we all measure time in little personal ways. I know it's seven o'clock in the morning because the hot water turns itself on with a "whoof". I know it's 10 o'clock at night because it turns itself of with a little sigh of satisfaction. When we first moved into this house 20-odd years ago there was a late night bus that went by at about half-past 11, and there was an early-morning bus that coughed into life at half-past five-ish. The early milkman went down the street, clinking, at half-past four, and the later milkman's electric milk float whizzed (if milk floats can whizz) past the house at about 10 to six.

Maybe there's something in my internal body clock that's been shaped by these buses and barbers and milkmen, and maybe that's why I'm always early, sometimes ridiculously early, meaning that I hang around station cafs and other appointed meeting spots for hours, measuring out my life in coffee spoons, as TS Eliot said. What time is it? Two espressos past four.

Mind you, I've never been as early as my old mate the playwright Dave Sheasby who died earlier this year, was once. He'd been invited to give a talk to an Author's Circle somewhere in the heavy woollen district

and he arrived a year early. This particular writers' group asked speakers two years in advance and they'd invited him for 2007 and he turned up in 2006. He walked in and they all turned and looked at him as though it was a cowboy film and he was a baddy entering a saloon. "Good evening" he said. "You're a bit early," somebody said, employing irony. "Don't you start till half past?" Dave asked,

innocently. They pointed out he was a year early. He gaped in disbelief. He looked at his letter. It was true. He was a year early. It was a bit like Father Christmas turning up to a summer barbecue. He had to go away and come back again a year later. He gets the gold in

the Early Olympics!

So as time tattooes its presence everywhere, we could invent loads of unique calendars and clocks to mark its passing. The Length-of-Toenail Clock could measure the days or weeks between the last cutting session. The Ribena bottle's level calculates the number and frequency of visits my grandson Thomas makes to our house, which equates with some ancient civilisations who used to measure time with water levels dropping in a bottle.

On a bigger stage, the level of water in the water-butt behind the garage rises and falls, not only with the rainfall but also with the watering sessions, providing a complicated calendar of days and weeks spent sheltering in the house or wandering in the garden irrigating the plants. By water-butt time, it's three watering cans since the last dry Sunday. I said it was complicated.

And of course there's that most reliable of Yorkshire timekeeping

devices, the Yorkshire Post. It's a calendar: if I'm reading the

football results, it must be Monday. If you're reading this, it must be Tuesday. Unless of course you save all the papers and read them at the weekend. Unless of course you lost Tuesday's paper under a pile of

stuff and didn't rediscover it until Thursday, but let's keep it

simple. It's a clock: if I'm reading the letters its 10 to. If I'm reading the international news it quarter past. If I'm reading the business pages it's exactly on the hour. And if I'm reading Ian

McMillan's column it's, obviously, the best time in the day.

There: time for my post-column cup of tea...