For the love of clocks

I often wonder if children are still taught to tell the time on a clock face. These days everyone has a digital watch, if they wear a watch at all. I think a lot of people just use their phones to check the time.

I like clocks. I like chiming clocks that wind up with a key. I like cuckoo clocks, I know a lot of people don’t. I like town clocks enclosed in towers and mechanical clocks that perform a musical routine on the hour.

I prefer it if the clock face or watch face shows all the numbers and preferably has a second hand. I don’t mind Roman Numerals, they are not that hard to learn.

There are a few clocks that I don’t like quite so much. I’m not fond of my alarm clock when it goes off before sunrise so we can get out early for an outing. I don’t often have to get up early these days fortunately. We once had a clock with a sensor that was sensitive to light. It hung in the passage and in the morning the sun would shine in and the sound would be triggered. It was a train clock so we’d be treated to the loud sounds of trains puffing and whistling on the hour. We love trains but eventually we had to pull the batteries out because it would go off from about six in the morning onwards. I’ve seen clocks like this with birds but I think I’d rather be woken by real birds than recorded ones.