Granny’s clock is a masterpiece of human ingenuity

LIKE many people, I love old clocks. I don’t mean the electronic, digital kind that rule our lives. I’m talking about mechanical clocks you have to wind up at regular intervals. I have three old clocks in my lounge and only one of them actually tells the time. The others tick away, day after day, offering different opinions about the time.

That’s absolutely fine by me. What would be the point of having three clocks if they all told the same time?

To me an old- fashioned pendulum clock is one of the engineering marvels of the human race. Somehow it seems to be in tune with the rhythms of the planet. You don’t mess with an old clock. You leave it alone as much as possible. From time to time my part-time housekeeper takes it into her head to move the long-case clock and dust underneath it and then it takes me at least three days to get it working again.

A proper old clock needs to be exactly vertical to work properly.

If it tilts just half a degree off vertical the tick becomes longer than the tock and the clock sulks and stops.

I slip slivers of thin card under the feet of the clock to get it set exactly upright and the housekeeper sees them sticking out and dutifully removes them and tosses them in the bin.

My most revered clock is a brass masterpiece more than a century old and encased in a glass dome. It belonged to my late grandmother and needs to be wound only once a year. How’s that for a piece of ingenuity! Granny used to wind it on Christmas day. Officially it should run for 400 days on a single wind, but we’ve never allowed it to run down.

It stands there, gleaming in its glass cage with the weight swinging ever so slowly round in one direction, then pausing and swinging just as slowly the other way.

Totally hypnotic and completely random in its estimation of time.

Two of my clocks chime every quarter hour, so I keep one of them permanently switched to silent mode. Life would be a little rowdy if both of them sang out together.

My clocks have nothing to do with telling the time. If I want to know the time I glance at the boring (cheap) quartz-powered watch on my wrist. It’s always accurate and no fun at all.

The reason I love my three old clocks is that they are monuments to human ingenuity and were made long ago when there were no power tools. Every little spring and gearwheel was fashioned lovingly by hand by a craftsman who had learned his trade from a long line of inherited skill.

I feel it my duty to honour those skills.

Last Laugh

Man is a strange creature.

We spend our working lives waking up by the clock, catching a train by the clock, clocking in to work, clocking out at the end of every day and going home to have supper by the clock.

Then, when we finally retire and no longer have to care about time, what does the company do?

They present you with a watch.