Dear LPG, 

A few things can completely upset your day if you leave home without them. Have you ever left home for the day and got halfway down the street before noticing that you have two odd shoes on or that you have forgotten something else? Keys definitely qualify, but not having your phone is perhaps the worst thing for the young. 

While the realisation of not having the power to talk on the go can feel like the end of the world for most of them, perhaps the other thing that even many of us older people would miss is a watch.

Time is so important to all of us that there are few places in the Western world where the local version of it is not accessible to us when walking down a high street anywhere in the UK, we look up to see a public timepiece. But so many time machines have come full circle in a way. For so many, reading a clock has become more and more about looking at four digits which change each second and less about watching the hands travel around a clock face.

Did you know that the first ever mechanical clock was said to have been invented more than 600 years ago? I read that the oldest working one can be found in Salisbury Cathedral and dates back to the year 1386. The interesting thing is that it does not have a face, either. 

Mechanical clocks with faces and that tick are much more likely to be at the top of a tower, and the noisier watches are found among the really expensive ones that the Swiss are so famous for making. I wonder how many clocks in your home you have to physically change when the clocks go backwards or forward these days or how many clocks you can hear.

But for all that, so many of our films still feature that familiar ticking sound that even the young associate with the passing of time or the expectancy of the end of some aspect of it. 

I found a website which lists 25 films that use the sound of ticking clocks to make a point about time and wonder how many readers’ children and grandchildren still recognise the significance of that often-haunting sound even though, for at least a decade, we rarely hear the tick-tock of a clock any more in reality.

RB, Grove Park

RB shares some of the internet evidence that corroborates her thoughts…

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