If You Want to Know the Time.....

Today

Our bathroom clock is acting silly. It's one of those which have a radio link to a national clock somewhere in Derby and automatically corrects the time. Except that this one obviously doesn't like to be told. Right now - it's being very obedient. But sometimes, especially when on a trip to the loo in the middle of the night I am surprised to discover that the clock now busily thinks it's 8 o'clock.

It even tries to prove it by getting the hands to do a little twirl, as though it's now paying close attention to that Derby clock and will present you with unassailable accuracy. Only it doesn't -after daintily spinning the hands it will settle at 10.30 or something equally untrue.

Our bedside clocks behave impeccably - a quick touch on the top and they flash the right time in red onto the ceiling. And the changes to and from BST don't faze them at all. You can attach them to mains power and have the light on all the time, but I think that's a bit much. The clock in the lounge is also very good. We did have a video recorder with one of these radio clocks which was normally very good, but got puzzled by BST changes and would sometimes take a week to pay attention. Which was annoying if you wanted to record something.

Every room in our house has at least one clock, but what I notice is that we no longer have to wind clocks and watches up - a battery is replaced from time to time, that's all.

In My Day

Not so when I was a child. At 4 Beulah we had 3 main clocks. In the living room on the mantelpiece was a very simple but quite nice Deco clock that was actually electric. So this was the one that we relied upon because it never stopped. Except in a power failure of course, which could cause puzzlement if one forgot and simply glanced at it a few hours later when it was ticking away again. I have an idea that this clock was a wedding present to my parents.

On the wall next to the door was a black and handsome cuckoo clock. There was a real little wooden cuckoo that popped out on the hour and half hour. It had a slightly worn spring so the "cuckoo" was always preceded by a metallic "boing". This clock needed attention often as the great pinecone shaped weights gradually slipped towards the floor. If we let it stop we had to allow the cuckoo to sound each missing hour; otherwise he would confidently announce that it was 4 o'clock at half-past 9 or something.

In the next room was an "8 day" clock which only needed winding every 8 days. This looked rather like a railway clock. As we rarely used that room, the clock always needed to be wound up.

All we children had alarm clocks which rattled out the alarm and needed setting daily if you weren't to be late for school. Watches were a puzzle; I simply couldn't get a normal clockwork watch to work on my wrist. They would go fast, slow, or stop for unpredictable periods of time. In the end I took to wearing a watch, nurse-style on my front.

The most glorious clock was given to Daddy when he retired. It was an enormous brass sun-ray clock which Daddy absolutely loved and which sat proudly on the wall of our Victorian house, looking quite out of place.

Actually I rather like the nihilistic tendencies of the bathroom clock and have no plans to get rid of it

One (wo) man went to mow

Today

I ache all over. I've been spending the last two days trying to sort out Lizzie's back garden. Why she chose to buy a house with about 80ft of garden when she hasn't a green digit anywhere is a mystery. I suspect she had fantasies about friends, Pimms and barbecues, but forgot that grass needs managing.

Seeing the grass for the first time last year and that it was a lawn, overgrown but manageable, I bought her a decent Flymo and did the first cut. "Just do this about every 2-3 weeks throughout the summer" I said, without much hope "and it'll stay in shape". So Lizzie had a go a few weeks later. Anxious that she might kill a frog (frogs can move really fast) she lost concentration and sliced through the cable. No problem - friend X would sort it - which he did but not before the winter.

The mower languished, some of the time outside where the electrics fused and the plastic fittings became brittle. An attempt to cut the grass this summer resulted in pure frustration, so the meadow flourished like the wicked and the green bay tree and the mower lost hope, standing on the patio during one of the wettest summers on record. Lizzie began to fantasise about finding lost ruins in the grass - more Mayan than Inca - but what we actually found were bedsprings and garden implements whose function was obscure, but whose capacity to wreck the mower blades was unparalleled

"Stop being so proud and let your parents help" says I "It's what we're for." Which is how I found myself wrestling with 3ft high tussocks of grass. We did give in and buy a new Flymo and some proper shears. I sank low enough to accept the help of the neighbour's small children. They really enjoyed heaving up armfuls of grass and putting it in the sacks.

In My Day

The lawn at the back of 4 Beulah would have put Lizzie's to shame. While Chris was still sorting out maths and spatial awareness he calculated that the lawn was 100 yards long. He might have exaggerated but it sometimes felt that it might be miles long.

While we did have a cleaning lady, Tillie Lawrence by name, to look after the common parts of the house, we never seemed to rise to gardening help. When the grass got too long there would be a family expedition to tackle it. Shears were used to hack away the worst bits and then it was mowed. For many years we just had a manual rotary mower. Now, I've got one of these but it mows about 10 square feet of lawn. But of course the lawn at 4BH was far too much for such a feeble machine. Anything stronger than the finest blades of grass it just ignored so that the lawn always had an arrogant parade of spindly stalks. We had a grass rake called a "springbok" which took nerves of steel to use. (it was long years before I realised that that it was a brand name and that springboks were actually antelopes.)

Finally Daddy gave in and bought a "motor mower". This petrol driven beast was started by pulling on an ignition rope. Mostly the mower failed to start. If it did it took off down the lawn with you hanging desperately to the handles as it wove its own way through the grass. The lawn at 4BH was never of that perfectly smooth type with lovely lines that you saw on the adverts. Once Daddy lost a pair of shears in the long grass. He said that he had a supernatural experience, with the shears summoning him to their location in order to find them.

I think that gardening generally at Beulah Hill was a spasmodic affair driven by the fear of being completely overtaken by vegetation, rather than by a love of horticulture, or even tidiness.

So I'm truly fascinated by my brother's plans to have a fully ornamental garden at his place - with knot garden and herb garden, like a Chateau on the Loire. Now that's really bucking the trend.