In these, the very dog days of August, indeed, the last dog-eared weekend of August, our thoughts turn to the passing of time.

I do not mean time in the sense of months, the unpleasant crossing of the crevasse between holiday and real life. I don’t mean the shuddering, wheezing return to work, the creaky reopening of friendships and newspapers, the longueurs of the ticketed school-shoes queue in John Lewis and the frenzied search for Oyster travelcards, inevitably found in the dryer de-fluffer. No, I mean the escape from punctuality and deadlines, the tossing aside of hours and minutes, without which people did very well for many a millennium.

On the second day of our holiday in Scotland, I destroyed my watch. I was surfing on one of those kids’ boogie boards in the waves off Westport Beach near Machrihanish, and when I returned to shore I realised my trusty, ancient Swatch “water resistant to 30m” had died, leaking its last, soggy minutes into the mighty swell. Thus, for the first time in 13 years, since my first-born first yelled for milk to be delivered on the dot, I lost all sense of time.

Some of you – adolescents, absent-minded professors – will not understand what it was like always being under the lash of the minute hand. But I was a time junkie; there was no moment in my life uncounted. I always knew when I was procrastinating, and I was guiltily aware of lateness. I told the time even when underwater. My wrist where the watch had lived all those years was white and wrinkled, like the skin you see on the ring fingers of the long married but newly divorced.

Like many divorces, this one turned out to be unexpectedly liberating. Punctuality matters as a politeness and at work. But there are other, more ridiculous deadlines: you can become a domestic Mussolini getting children to school on time and keeping a small army housed and fed. Regularly. But I realised on holiday, after a week of watchlessness, that breakfast had slopped into lunch, and children were finishing dinner at 10pm, and that none of it mattered. Besides, it was still light in Scotland until late.

We threw off the last shackles of the Gina Ford-ist Contented Little Baby routine that had lurked years after its usefulness. I had once believed clockwork babies must breakfast at seven, nap at eleven, and be bedded at seven to prevent them becoming uncontrolled, unhappy tyrants. Routine was a safety harness in those dark days when a squalling, unreasonable, non-verbal creature entered your life.

How extraordinary that a simple thing like taking off a watch could bring a deep relaxation, and for a price much less than a week at a spa. Obviously, for this escape from the hurly-burly, from “the world of telegrams and anger” described by E.M. Forster, it helped to be on holiday.

There was one particularly brilliant day (among many soggy ones) when we took a boat out to the Garvellachs, a string of islands conquered by St Brendan even before St Columba came to Iona. The early monks built a monastery and an extraordinary beehive cell with its tunnel entrance framing the view of the bay and islands. There the monks meditated, losing all sense of days and months, never mind the sordid modern minute. I felt a new respect for them.

Then we swam off the boat, flipping into the clear-bottomed bay in our wetsuits. (A digression: all should have wetsuits. It’s the best twenty quid you will ever spend. You can be in ice-age Scotland but feel as toasty as Roman Abramovich on his yacht in the Med. Add £5 swimming shoes to protect from rocks and sea urchins and you have a black, rubberised family, looking really, really stupid, but for once no one is blue-faced and weeping in their holiday snaps. Scottish children always used to favour wearing shorts, sandshoes and a wee hairy jumper to the beach, and the wetsuit is the modern equivalent of that ensemble.)

Anyway, at an eveningish sort of time, we headed back past the Corryvreckan Whirlpool and waited silently, engines off for an unspecified period, until minke whales and porpoises rose up and started doing flips as though the whirlpool were a Jacuzzi. Well worth waiting for, for however long.

So you can imagine how unpleasant it was to be back working. And how much nastier it was to be delayed in Luton airport. There was plenty of opportunity to buy a new watch, since airports are cathedrals for tense clockwatchers. Hesitantly, I tried some watches on, but none was quite right. It may be some time before I can bear to buy one.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

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