"My grandfather's clock was too tall for the
shelf...."
Actually, it's my great-grandfather's clock, and it
fits very well on the windowsill of my spare room. I like to think that
Alexandr the meerkat appreciates its rather ornate style, which is why he's
sitting next to it rather than poor Vassily, who seemed rather disturbed when I
put him there.
Being of a somewhat rockerish persuasion myself I
can understand his distress; during my teenage years I couldn't be doing with
it at all.
It was fine when the clock lived with my
grandmother; it was part of my childhood and symbolized dependability and
continuity. Then mum and I went to live with my grandmother too, and I
realized that it chimed every 15 minutes, day and night. As I recall, it
played a little tune at a quarter past, which got progressively longer at half
past and quarter to. On the hour it was the full tune, followed by the
appropriate number of chimes. Sleeping was impossible; as soon as you
dropped off, the damn thing would chime again, so mum and I decided to sabotage
it. First, we stopped winding the bit that played the tune. That
was a bit better, but the hourly chimes were still too loud, so we tried
stuffing the bell with cotton wool. That didn't do much good, so next we
covered the bell with as many layers of fabric as we could. Now, when the
little hammer hit the bell, it just made a gentle thud. Peace at
last! Except that then we started getting worried that we might have
damaged the mechanism, because the little hammer would want to go further than
it could. We pulled all the fabric out, and stopped winding the clock
altogether.
That would have been fine, except my grandmother
noticed at this point that the clock wasn't going. We wound it up, and
re-set the time. On reflection, it would have been better to re-set the
hands and then wind it up, because as we changed the time from 5:15 to
2:25 we had to wait at each hour for the chimes to finish. Or at least,
we should have done. It did its best to keep up as we whizzed the hands
through the hours, but we discovered that it had saved up all the un-bonged
chimes when, at 3 o'clock, it struck 17. After that it never knew what
time it was. It always chimed something on the hour, but the
number of bongs rarely related to the actual time. It made life
interesting, if rather unpredictable.
In the interests of getting a good night's sleep, I
haven't wound the clock in years. Now, however, I have the Minster bells
to contend with. They too play a tune every 15 minutes, but at least
that's turned off overnight, and the number of chimes is generally consistent
with the hour. It's actually rather nice, and you can hear it all over
the town. The trouble is, the silences between the bongs often aren't the
same length. At, say, 11 o'clock, the first few chimes are evenly spaced.
There's an extra fraction of a second between the next two or three, then the
final chimes are more (or possibly less) spaced out. It's only a tiny
amount of difference, but very noticeable if you happen to be counting, and
hoping that it isn't time to get up yet. The suspense of waiting to see
if there will actually be any more chimes tends to leave you wide awake
anyway. In a way, I hope they don't fix it; I rather like quirky and
unpredictable.
