31 March - Day 25 - In two shakes of a lamb's tail

It’s odd what you think about while cycling.

First of all, I felt that my lamb photography last week had been a bit sheepskate and certainly wouldn’t win any lambslide victory in a competition - so I decided to have another go today.

The second thing I thought about was the phrase ‘In two shakes of a lamb’s tail’, which you don’t often hear. If you are familiar with this, you will know it means to do something very quickly but it has more recently shortened to the more familiar phrase, ‘in two shakes’. Looking it up again when I got to the Centre, it was first seen in 1840 but it is likely that this followed from an older phrase, ‘in two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail’. which means something will not be done, at all.

What I hadn’t realised is that scientists, knowing the phrase, have attributed a time measurement to the term. So if someone says they will be back in ‘two shakes’ you should expect them in 2 x 10 nanoseconds (1 second is equal to 100000000 shake.)

I would say I’ll be back in a jiffy to write the next blog tomorrow but as this is also an actual measurement and there are about three hundred thousand billion billion jiffys in a second, I think I might just take a little longer!