The Clock

            (The Gubbins Edition)

I found a clock in a skip.

                                I KNOW!

Someone threw it away. A whole clock! Working! In a SKIP! 

I cannot explain this. 

I cannot understand this. 

I have tried, really I have. 

                                    I've asked loads of people. 

                                

                                                                            Nobody has a good answer. 

The world is just like this sometimes and you have to accept it 

and also rescue the clock NOW before someone else comes along and breaks it more.

The casing was a bit bashed. The front was cracked. 

The face had lost one of its hands somewhere along the way which means strictly speaking it can only tell you approximately what time it is and not exactly, which some people might consider a problem.

I am not some people.

I took the back off.

    RIGHT.

            Okay.

                    So.

Inside a clock — and I mean properly inside, not the bit with the numbers, the ACTUAL inside, the bit that does the work — there is the most incredible collection of gubbins I have ever seen in my life.

And I have seen a LOT of gubbins.

There are the big cogs. I know those are cogs. Round, toothy, they turn and the teeth catch the next thing and the next thing turns because of it. I understand cogs. Cogs are my friends.

Then there are the little toothy ones. Smaller than the cogs. More of them. They fit into the gaps in the big ones and when the big ones move, the little ones move, and when the little ones move, something else moves, and the whole lot of it is just — everything talking to everything else, all at once, constantly, without stopping.

And then there's the springy bit. Coiled up tight in the middle. That's where the energy lives. Somebody wound it up and now it's slowly, carefully, using that stored-up energy to keep the whole lot going. Nothing wasted. Every bit of it counted out exactly. The spring knows how much it's got and it spends it right.

                                                (I cried a bit at this point. Don't tell anyone.)

        The bar thing.

                    The bar thing is my favourite.

I don't know what it's called. I tried to look it up once and the word I found is very long and I ... well I just don't trust it.  So: bar thing.  The bar thing rocks. Back and forth. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. And every time it rocks it lets one tooth of one cog go past. Just one. Then it catches the next one. Holds it. Lets it go. Holds the next one. On and on and on.

                    That's how it counts.

                                            That's how the whole thing knows the time.

The bar thing just. Counts. The teeth going past. One at a time. Every one the same. Nothing missed. Nothing skipped.

                                IT KNOWS THE TIME.

                                                                  I cannot get over this.

The whole front of the clock can be missing. The hands can be gone. The casing can be bashed. It can be in a skip. Nobody looking. Nobody winding it up right now. Nobody doing anything.

                    And the gubbins just. Goes.

                                                Tick.

                                                        Tock.

                                                                    Counting the teeth.

                                                                                                Keeping the time.

                                                                                                                            For nobody.

BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT IT DOES.

It doesn't need you to watch. It doesn't need you to know it's doing it. It just knows what it's for and it does it and it keeps doing it and nothing about the bashed casing or the missing hand or the skip changes that.

                The mechanism knows.

                                   The mechanism has ALWAYS known.

                                                        I sat on my bench for quite a long time just watching the gubbins go.

Then I took some photographs.

Then I watched it a bit more.

Then I had a think about it.

Then I tried to take it apart to understand the springy bit better and I had a small incident but it's mostly fine now and I won't go into it here because the point is the clock.

The clock is running again. "Fully Operational". I found a replacement hand. It knows the exact time.

Of course it does.

                            It always did.

                                                Somebody threw this away.

                                                                                I think about that a lot.

They looked at the bashed casing and the cracked face and they thought: broken. Finished. Skip.

They never looked at the gubbins.

I don't understand that.

        But I'm glad they did it.

                Because now it's mine.

                        And I watch the doins doing their doins every morning.

And it's the best thing in the garage.

(Apart from the trebuchet. But the trebuchet doesn't keep time. Yet.)