When I left EastEnders, I could have earned an absolute fortune from sexy calendars, shoots for lads' mags, fitness videos and reality shows. But I always turned them down.

Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars and songs like 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.'

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

Things that are important to us are written in our calendars. If you want to be intentional about setting aside time to pray, you need to plan for it.

Philosophers of freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of human histories remained unrelated. This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen, is what climate scientists now claim has collapsed. The period I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is also the time when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel-first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.