On Monday evening, as the daylight finally began to contemplate shrinking away from Centre Court, Gilles Muller beat Rafael Nadal in an epic five-set match; the final set finishing fifteen games to thirteen.  The match lasted four hours and forty-eight minutes.

That’s a long time to be playing tennis; a long time to be doing anything.  I don’t normally count my periods of sentient consciousness to be as long as four hours and forty-eight minutes.

In that same time, it is possible to fly from London to Cairo on a commercial airline.  Or London to Jerusalem.  Or London to Tenerife.  Or Tbilisi.

Four hours and forty-eight minutes is long enough to watch Kill Bill 1 and Kill Bill 2 and still allow yourself a thirty-nine-minute interval in which to have a meaningful discussion on the subject of whether Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a derivative plagiarist.

Marathon world record holder Dennis Kimetto could complete two entire marathons in four hours and forty-eight minutes and still have forty-two minutes to spare in order to jog along another nine miles.

The average reading speed is estimated at two hundred words per minute at a sixty-five per cent comprehension rate (so this blog post should take you roughly two minutes and twenty-three seconds to complete; I won’t put any pressure on comprehension).  That speed equates to reading approximately one page of a standard novel every two minutes, or one hundred and forty-four pages in four hours and forty-eight minutes.  That is a Great Gatsby; or a Cement Garden; or an Animal Farm plus the first thirty-two pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Fidel Castro was someone who was notorious for the length of his speeches, but even he could have taken nineteen minutes for water breaks during his 1960 speech to the General Assembly in a time of four hours and forty-eight minutes.

Phew!  Four hours and forty-eight minutes: and yet that is not even the longest match ever played at Wimbledon.  In 2012, Marin Cilic and Sam Querrey fought out an epic battle lasting five hours and thirty-one minutes; the longest continuous match at Wimbledon.  However, this achievement is surpassed by John Isner and Nicolas Mahut’s 2010 encounter.  Played over three days, the players were on court for a frankly unimaginable total of eleven hours and five minutes; Isner finally emerging victorious by seventy games to sixty-eight in the final set.  Madness!

A lot of beer could be drunk in four hours and forty-eight minutes.  The Guinness Book of World Records claims that Eric Lean of Crawley once drunk seven and three quarter pints in five minutes.  In four hours and forty-eight minute that equates to roughly four hundred and forty-six pints.

Personally, I prefer to pace myself and, besides, the clock is ticking on my current period of sentient conscious…

© Beery Sue

Beery Sue needs a power nap between both pints and sets.