My life has been concerned with several aspects of time. This autobiography describes how time became important in my recreational and intellectual life, and how I became interested in insects and then fulfilled my early ambition for a career in Entomology.

Most of us think that we understand the concept of time - but it is an idea that is very difficult to define. For most organisms (plants and animals) on the surface of the Earth it is best described in terms of planetary movements: the spinning of the Earth on its axis, the revolution of the Earth around the sun, and the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. These planetary movements give rise to days, months, years and to the complexities of the tides, and find their biological counterparts, within the organisms as true biological clocks that express daily, annual and lunar rhythms in behaviour and physiology. On a non-rhythmic or linear scale (the ‘Arrow of Time’) we also see a sequence of states running from the past, through the present to the future. The present can only be an instant in time; a microsecond later (or less) the present becomes the past and ‘exists’ only in our memories or in artefacts to confirm its previous existence. The future also does not exist: it has yet to happen. Nevertheless, many plants and animals (including humans) are able to extrapolate from past and present experience to predict the future and prepare for its arrival. In many organisms, experience of changing day length may be used to prepare physiological states for future needs in timing reproduction or for surviving the advent of adverse conditions.

My life, then, has been concerned with various aspects of time, not only in the obvious ‘developmental’ sense - birth, growth, maturation and senescence - but in at least three other ways, which may be regarded as aspects of the present, the past and the future. The present is represented by my recreational interests in cycling time trials. The past is represented by my studies of the permanent age changes in insects that record earlier reproductive events. And the future is represented by my studies on how insects react to seasonal changes in day length and temperature and prepare themselves, both physiologically and behaviourally, for the approach of winter. This account is how I became involved in these aspects of time.