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