HAPPY new year everyone; isn’t it strange how time flies faster than a transatlantic jet?

How can it be 2026 already? How can it not still be the year 2000, or sometimes in the mid-1970s?

One thing is true, though: time can never be reversed, no matter how much some people might want that to happen.

And another thing is true: time moves at different speeds for different people, and everybody’s personal time zones are different.

We all know that because we remember that time seems to drag when you’re a child but when you get beyond the age of 60 it seems to speed up.

As Hamlet says: ‘time is out of joint’ although in an early draft of Shakespeare’s play I have it on good academic authority that he said ‘time is out of joint, tha knows’ because the bard (that’s the other bard, of course… I’m The Bard) originally planned that Hamlet would come from round here and would have been Prince of Tarn rather than Prince of Denmark.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time being out of joint and out of step and out of kilter and out of anything you can think of lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that even in an area as relatively small, in global terms, as Barnsley borough, there are different time zones.

Of course we all know that in areas of land as big as Europe there are loads of different time zones – but I reckon there might be a few round here and all.

My first inkling of the time zones around the borough came a few years ago when (and I’ve told this story before on these pages but it haunts me) I was walking through Mapplewell and an old man came out of a front door and said, in a voice that sounded like a squeaky gate that needed oiling with a good cup of tea: ‘settle me an argument: what day is it?’

‘Thursday’ I replied confidently, feeling like that boy in A Christmas Carol that Ebenezer Scrooge asks more or less the same question to.

The bloke in Mapp thanked me and went back inside and I carried on walking.

Of course that story is very much of its time: a time before universal broadband when you can just look at your phone and it will tell you what day it is and what time it is.

That bloke genuinely didn’t know what day it was and I was glad to be of service.

But what about, what about, what about (as my three-year-old grandson Louie says) if it was actually a different day in Mapplewell that morning? It was Thursday in Darfield when I left but maybe it was Friday in Mapplewell, or maybe I’d fallen into some kind of temporal vortex around Stairfoot Roundabout and it was Wednesday?

In the week before Christmas, I got the 27 bus from Darfield to Wombwell for a meeting at Cudworth Library to discuss the forthcoming Barnsley Book Festival which, I can tell you, promises to be fantastic.

I like the 27 bus; it’s a real workhorse of a service.

The first one passes me when I’m on my early stroll and it’s left Wombwell at 05.30 and the last one could bring me back from Barnsley or Wombwell late in the evening.

It’s the opposite of an express bus too: it takes its time trundling around the map. And maybe it takes its time trundling across different time zones.

I can say categorically that it was 08.40 when I got on the bus in Darfield. I know that because I looked at my phone just before the bus arrived. It wasn’t far from the shortest day and it was dark. Proper dark.

And yet, as we got to Cat Hill it seemed lighter, much lighter, although I’d only been on the bus for a few minutes. It felt as though, rather than being about 08.45 it was about 09.45.

Lots of people got on the bus at GXO in Grimethorpe and a lot of them were yawning because, I guess, they’d been working nights.

So for them, it was the crack of dawn and for me it was about 08.55 and in Cat Hill standard time it was nearly time for your dinner.

And by the time we got to Cudworth (and not just because the bus was trundling) it felt like late afternoon.

Settle me an argument: what time is it?