It was a mere three decades.
A mere three decades in, the dream was effectively over.
A mere eight decades later, the technology may at last come to fruition.
Now, a mere four decades later, the triangular four-and-a-half-acre park is almost ready for its first visitors.
Workers on the site report a shortage of building materials, but they expect the first patients before the year is out, a mere two decades late.
Acting with its usual celerity, the Admiralty instituted the practice of issuing lime juice rations to sailors a mere two decades later, in 1795.
The decline of the studio system, the rise of television-all the forces that were eating away at the old Hollywood-would enable Wasserman, in a mere two decades, to build an empire of his own.
This year the city's second Metro line opened – a mere two decades after the launch of the first – connecting central Warsaw with the neighbourhoods on the east side of the Vistula river, such as Praga.
Or so it seems, looking back on a mere three decades or so of revolutionary dance made in the heyday of that new art by women and men with larger-than-life personalities.
Last week I wrote about the fact that Vietnam's own rhino, a subspecies of the Javan rhinoceros only discovered in 1988, had been wiped out by poachers for the traditional Asian medicine trade in a mere two decades, and suggested that this should make us think hard about ourselves as a species and our killer tendencies.
