I was born late and I've stayed that way. I intend to be late for my own funeral. Well, I will be, won't I?

I have no concept of the passage of time. Never have. When I was a child, out playing with my mates, I was constantly getting into trouble for not coming home on time. My infuriated parents gave me a cheap Timex when I was nine but I never thought to look at it. When I did, it was always a shock. No! It can't possibly be that time, I've only been doing this/reading this/watching this/travelling here for a few minutes. Fifty years later, I'm still the same. I look up to the top right of my screen and think 'what on Earth have I been doing that's taken an hour and a half longer than I thought?'.

In my perception, everything takes 'a few minutes', especially reading and writing. When I read, time does not exist. I have lost count of how many times I've gone to bed with a book and looked up to realise it's dawn and thought 'well, I'll just finish this chapter'. How often do I say 'I'll just reply to this email before I leave, it will only take a minute' and then, a few perceived seconds later, discover half an hour has disappeared?

I am chronically late. It's pathetic and I only have myself to blame. I'm not making excuses and I can't justify it. Perhaps I am temporally dysfunctional. Time challenged. I'm now late again. Late delivering the first draft of my next book to my editor. So late that I really shouldn't be diverting any of my time into writing this.

There's a black hole at the centre of the universe called 'the past'. It eats time . Its event horizon is called 'now' and everything that crosses that horizon is trapped for ever. Nothing can escape the black hole of time – it's a strictly one-way journey – and as the black hole consumes more time, it grows and its power increases exponentially. The future is accelerating towards it, rushing past the now into oblivion.

Hmm... it took longer than I thought to torture that metaphor.