BC:AD (U.A. Fanthorpe)

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

from The Stranger in the Mirror, chapter 1, Message in a Bottle (Jane Shilling)

Meanwhile I notice that my contemporaries have gone quiet.  The bold candour with which we always used to report to each other from the front lines of our lives has been replaced with a muffled discretion.  Once upon a time we couldn't wait to tell the next episode.  The vagaries of our lovers, our employers, our parents, our shopping habits, our looks - all became part of a rolling comic monologue.

With pregnancy and childbirth, a rich new vein of material emerged: the preposterous indignities of pregnancy, from the moment your navel pops inside out, mutating overnight from a sexy hollow to a ludicrous fleshy bobble, to the weary realisation, towards the end of gestation, that you'd pull down your knickers and offer your underparts for examination to almost anyone who demanded it with sufficiently crisp authority; the outrageous shock of labour, the unexpected catastrophe of raw feeling - rage, exhaustion, terror, boredom, love - with which the passionate intensity of motherhood is compounded.

Time passed, the children began to grow up, but still the conversation continued: more fractured now, and at longer intervals, reduced by the rending demands of work and family; the savage battle to secure some scraps of time in which to remind oneself of who one used to be, from a daily soap opera to erratic messages in bottles, brief bulletins flung into the overwhelming tides of domesticity, often saying little more than, 'I am still here.  Are you?'

from Busman's Honeymoon, Epithalamion, 3, Talboys: Crown Celestial (Dorothy L. Sayers)

One of the most admirable features of the English criminal law is said to be its dispatch.  You are tried as soon as possible after your arrest, the trial takes three or four days at most, and after your conviction (unless, of course, you appeal), you are executed within three weeks.

Crutchley refused to appeal, preferring to announce that he done it, that he'd do it again, and let them get on with it, it made no odds to him.

Harriet, in consequence, was left to form the opinion that three weeks was quite the worst period of waiting in the world.  A prisoner should be executed the morning after his conviction, as after a court-martial, so that one could get all the misery over in a lump and have done with it.  Or the business should be left to drag on for months and years, as in America, till one was so weary of it as to have exhausted all emotion.