With time on his hands, thanks to a 30-hour flight delay in Denver, Chris Leadbeater gets hung up on Madonna's back catalogue
Time goes by, so slowly. So slowly, so slowly, so slowly, so slowly ... Is that a reference to a Madonna song? Why, yes, it is. It's a lyrical snippet from her 2005 single Hung Up. Although, in truth, that isn't the finest ditty in the so-called Queen of Pop's catalogue. It isn't a blueprint-forging early work such as Like a Virgin. It isn't a pure chunk of Top 10 sugar like True Blue. It isn't a dose of fabulous-songwriting-whatever-the-genre such as Like a Prayer. It isn't even naughty and salacious like Justify My Love. In fact, it's really just a weighty sample of Abba's Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! with some new vocals strung over the top.
So why mention it, in a travel column of all places? Well, because, a few weeks ago, those words about time moving at a glacial speed tumbled into my head. Mainly because I was sitting wearily in Denver airport, 11 hours into what, due to a severe case of a 747 with a broken engine, would be a 30-hour flight delay. So I had lots of time on my hands. Enough for my mind, otherwise unemployed, to wander into all sorts of cul-de-sacs. Ones marked "forgotten England cricketers of the 90s" (Mark Ealham, come on down), "unconvincing characters in F Scott Fitzgerald novels" (who calls their protagonist "Dick Diver", even in 1934?) — and, of course, "less-loved Madonna music of the early 21st century" (her soundtrack single to the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day — just awful).
And I also wondered — because this is the sort of topic you consider when you have many blank hours ahead of you — if there is any context wherein time moves more slowly than the wait for a plane which is refusing to depart at the moment that has been pre-arranged.
Yes, there are many situations in which time drags its heels so heavily you fear it has severed its Achilles. There are those long troughs of anticipation that separate all the face-to-face good stuff that shapes a new relationship. There is the everyday tedium of watching a kettle flirt with boiling point, while clearly — just to annoy you — refusing to achieve its destiny. There is the tension of watching your football team protect a single-goal lead under pressure in the dying stages of a match — an agony where the clock seems to reach the 86th minute, then decides to tick no further. There are the ever larger gaps between the albums made by your favourite once-iconic but increasingly irrelevant band.
