The line between public and private is blurring

We live in divided times. You can barely move these days without tripping over a contentious topic of debate: Brexit, North Korea, whether avocados really need to be described as “smashed” on restaurant brunch menus, and so on.

But finally, it seems, we have discovered the one issue designed to unite all of Britain in agreement: the muting of Big Ben. When it emerged the famous bongs would be silenced for four years while renovation work was carried out, there was an outcry. Theresa May weighed in, denouncing the idea with more passion than she levelled at Donald Trump’s failure to condemn violent white supremacists.

On Twitter, people complained in their droves, with one commentator wondering why no one had asked Big Ben what he wanted. Now the whole decision is under review. I’d never realised Big Ben was so loved. But it transpires it is a national treasure; the Dame Judi Dench of clocks. I think it’s because there’s something deeper at work here, and that is the notion of time itself.

Without Big Ben calling out the passing of each quarter-hour with clarion precision, how will we know where we stand? The BBC relies on Big Ben to announce its news programmes, which is the way I set my watch, which is therefore the way I measure out my day, confident that I will be catching trains and meeting friends at exactly the intended moment. Time-keeping is of profound importance to me because I’m a control freak, and being on time for things is the way I attempt to impose order on a chaotic cosmos, in which I am but a tiny speck of dust. Stephen Hawking posited in A Brief History of Time that intelligent life cannot exist in a disordered universe, and silencing Big Ben seems to me to be a very disordering thing to do. Which is why I’m going to be five minutes late to everything in protest until Big Ben’s bongs are restored.