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When time and sound stand still

I’ve seen them before, but always only fleetingly in the semi-darkness of dusk. This is different. In the brightness of a sharp spring morning, against vivid blue skies, not only time but sound also stands still and the eternal moment is pure poetry.
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Forget Four Weddings and a Funeral. Replace it with Four Lapwings and a Barn Owl. The call to ‘stop all the clocks’ ceases to be Auden’s lament for a lost lover and becomes the mystical silent imperative of a barn owl in flight.

A little peace of haven

April in Northumberland. In the eastern foothills of the Cheviots the River Breamish meanders its way through a gorse-peppered verdant landscape littered with the spring of new lambs and the warm snuffle of inquisitive calves. At times little more than a stream, beyond Powburn – which passes for metropolis in this remote part of the no man’s land between England and Scotland – the river provides the babbling artery to a separate world. In this stretch it is flanked in its flood plain by former gravel workings, now sensitively managed by the Hedgeley Estate to look every inch a natural part of the landscape, and a haven for birdlife.

In this, our first freedom from the latest lockdown, we park up the motorhome at Harry’s farm and meet friends, still coping with the strange sensation of keeping safe distance. And each morning, while the others sleep, I arise early and walk across the frost-crisp glistening grass, tiptoeing over the neatly tended gravel pathway so as not to disturb the sleepers, past the stone cottages and down through the gate into the valley, the sun already bright against the clearest of blue skies.

Yellowhammers in abundance

What happens next risks becoming a twitcher’s list – the flicker of sand martins contouring the river bank; the lone dipper feeding where the water tumbles over barely submerged gravel; the flopping flap of lapwing with their casually chaotic tumbling and turning, flashes of white underwing against the dazzling brightness of the morning; an abundance of chaffinch busy in the trees that at first flank the stream, and the cornucopia of teal, tufted ducks, moorhens and coot that share the mini-lakes with greylag, with the ubiquitous mallard, with mute swans and noisy Canada geese. The inevitable grey heron on the opposite bank, hunched in thought, spots me and, with what appears mild irritation, takes languid flight, brief and low, moving resentfully a hundred yards or so downstream.

But it is the yellowhammers I have come to see. Spectacularly bright, like countryside canaries, and always showmen, they pose proud atop the vibrant bushes looking, in their startling plumage, every inch an added sprig of flowering gorse. I am surrounded by them and, at that moment, it seems the day is complete.

Apparition

Across the River — **Picture courtesy of breamishvalley.com**

It is two miles in, just as I make to cross the river and head back to base along the opposite bank, that we meet – a lone hunting barn owl and me.

I had stopped to focus the binoculars on a nearby yellowhammer, to assimilate every detail of its plumage, its elegance, its vibrancy. Behind, in soft focus, at first sighting just a smudge, I see him. Wings wide, surprisingly so when outstretched, the barn owl keeps a steady course perhaps eight feet off the rough grass ground. He flies towards me, above the unkempt stretch of land which borders the small plantation of dark conifers beyond. He looks at first white, but as he flies towards me his soft brown-ness becomes clearer and his hallmark disc of a face, fixed in concentration, comes clearly into view.

Colour then becomes indefinable. Somehow, the owl is translucent, supernatural, a mirage, an apparition, yet at the same time more real than anything else I can recall.

My magical moment

He turns, his head facing downwards, scanning the rough undergrowth for prey. Then he is away, first to the far end of the plantation, then back, then disappearing soundlessly into the trees. That, I think, is it – my magical moment. I wait in the stillness, reliving the experience, trying to comprehend the pleasure of sharing that special moment with a bird in flight, simply appreciative of having witnessed it.

And then he is there again, materialising out of the conifers and flying low towards me, repeating his hunting cycle, concentrating, oblivious to my awestruck presence. For timeless minutes he hunts, resting once on a nearby fencepost, plunging occasionally to ground then taking off again and masterfully repeating the process.

Momentary, eternal

Mesmerised I watch, but I am not merely a witness – in my stillness, in my total absorption, I am in nature, part of nature, totally at one with it. The world has both stopped and continued. And I am struck by the powerful silence of an owl in flight – an echoing presence that, in its depth, drowns out the sound of anything else. Only if I concentrate hard can I hear the tuneful thrush behind me and the robin singing just feet to my left.

The resounding, haunting silence of the hunting owl is infinitely, captivatingly louder. While the barn owl hunts, all time and sound stands still. Momentarily. Eternally.

Really, who actually needs a clock or watch these days?

pocket watch — *Just in case you want to know what time it has been, or what time it is going to be.*

Five and twenty past seven. Nearly half past ten. Just gone quarter to eight. These are some words you won’t typically hear in a digital age. And I for one think we have lost something as a result.

Really, who actually needs a clock or a watch these days? And especially analogue ones?

After all, your computer constantly gives you the correct time with irritatingly unnerving precision. And we all know we waste too much time staring at the screen where the time constantly displays in the bottom right hand corner, more often than not ticking off hours and minutes that could be so much better spent.

And even there, I am showing my age. I recognise that nowadays people spend more time on their ‘mobile devices’ (how soulless a title is that?) than on their desktops. And the time is there too, in fabulous digital accuracy – 07.25, 22.29, 07.47 – always readily accessible.

All aboard

Even bus-stops now feature a digital display showing the current time and, with pinpoint precision, the exact time the next bus will arrive. No more glances at frantically tapped wristwatches and anxious over-acted peering down an empty street with the fearful worry that the bus might not turn up at all. Some of the excitement and frisson of travel by public transport has been lost as a result!

*Bus stop digital displays – great, when they work!*

Back to the future

Digital displays tell you absolutely what time it is and – don’t get me wrong – I am the first to acknowledge how useful that can be.

But what they don’t tell you is what time it has been, or what time it is going to be.

Don’t do the maths

My meeting is at half past ten. I glance at my analogue clock which tells me it has just gone five past ten. I can see in an instant how long before the meeting starts. It is there in almost half a dial of the clock. I don’t have to do any mental mathematics – additions or subtractions – to know how many minutes I have left to prepare (which for Zoom sessions mostly involves making a cup of tea) before the meeting starts. I can see at a glance. I know more than merely what time it is now – I know what time it is going to be.

I do still remember the era – the 1980s I guess – when filling stations started selling digital watches at £1.99 each – garish metal bracelets, ugly rectangular faces, time and date set by prodding the point of a pin into a dimpled recessed button in the side repeatedly in a process of trial and error. The whole device served its utilitarian purpose quite gracelessly before being thrown away in a matter of weeks or months, once the battery failed.

The device was functional, but much of the romance around the concept of time was lost at that point.

The romance of time

The old fashioned analogue clock face shows you the whole day – all twelve hours of it – and tells you the time in that context. Its hands point you to where you are in the overall shape of the day. Stare long and hard at the minute hand and you will see it moving through time – not flipping at the end of each minute into the next, but edging inexorably forwards towards what time it is going to be in the future.

Holding the past – promising the future

And timepieces help to hold onto the past and promise to shape a future too. No-one will hand on their latest smartphone, as an heirloom or keepsake, to their children or grandchildren. They hold no sentimental attraction. They speak nothing of the people who have owned them.

waltham pocket watch — *The Waltham ‘Traveler’ pocket watch which used to belong to my grandfather.*

But often, snugly in my pocket, I carry the watch that once belonged to my grandfather, and another pocket watch that my children bought me collectively for a recent birthday. They both have a timeless appeal and I treasure them.

They tell me what time it is, they tell me what time it has been since long before I was born. As importantly, they hold the tantalising promise of a long and lasting future to be passed on to the next generations.

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My grandfather died in 1968. His pocket watch is the only memento of him I have. It is an American Waltham Traveler, of which around 285,000 were produced. Many are still in circulation and are doubtless treasured by their owners. My grandfather’s was probably made in 1903.

I’ll do a separate post telling its story as best I can. Meanwhile, almost 120 years on, it still keeps perfect time.

Something to celebrate – year after year

A story about one brilliant marketing idea that changed everything for the 400-day clock.

*Running perfectly for another 400 days on a single wind.*

I didn’t used to like them but I do now.

I still struggle to say those words without smiling to myself about a story told to me by a former colleague. An old school-friend of hers with a dubious reputation had explained to her, by way of self-justification, how she had changed. ‘I didn’t used to be a virgin but I am now,’ she insisted. Well that’s Derbyshire for you!

Out of fashion

But I digress. 400-day clocks. I didn’t used to like them but I do now.

*Seen from above. the movement is ready to be dismantled and cleaned.*

You may recognise them. They are pretty much out of fashion at the moment. Indeed, even when they first appeared they were pretty much out of fashion too. It was only when an American importer came up with a brilliant marketing idea that everything changed.

Yes – for modern day tastes there is something a bit garish about 400-day clocks. Faux marble pillars, glass domes, sometimes over-elaborate and rather twee decoration on the enamelled chapter rings. But there is also something mesmerising about that rotating pendulum with its slow lazy insistent motion. And fashions change. What goes around comes around. Don’t write them off just yet.

Torsion

Almost inevitably on 400-day clocks that have been moved around the suspension wire will be bent or broken. With care they are easy to replace.

For the technically minded, I can explain that the 400-day clock features a torsion spring. What makes it exceptional is its rotating rather than swinging pendulum and the fact that it can run for 400 days on a single winding.

In Germany the 400-day clock is credited to Anton Harder of Ransen. But as ever with history, the truth is shrouded in conflicting stories. One says he was a simple farmer who got the idea as he watched a steam boiler hanging from a chain.

Another claims he was a nobleman who watched a chandelier rotating after the lamplighter had twisted it round to reach the last candle and then released it. He spotted that although the rotation reduced, the time between rotations remained constant even as the energy dissipated.

Extravagant claims

The story remains confusing. There is no German patent held by Harder, as far as we know. But on December 12th 1882, he covered himself in the US with patent No269052. He started manufacturing at his Jahresuhrenfabrik (Year Clock Factory). In 1882 he delivered his first clocks into the US. Originally The New Haven Clock Company was his sole US agent.

Despite some extravagant claims, the clocks didn’t perform well.

See the stain where the clicker which sits between the click spring and the ratchet wheel should be? (it is that, dipping in and out of that toothed ratchet wheel that gives the clock its clicking noise when you wind it, and stops the mainspring just releasing all its power and energy at once). How did it, and the screw holding it in place, go missing? Ours not to reason why. With a piece of brass I fashioned a replacement.

In 1884 he sold his patent to an FAL de Gruyter of Amsterdam who became the sole US agent and distributor of the clocks made at the German factory. Maybe they still weren’t selling well. Perhaps he just forgot. But in 1887 deGruyter failed to pay the patent renewal fee and the patent was cancelled.

Marketing genius

By far the most successful importer to the US was the Ohio based Bowler & Burdick and it was their stroke of marketing genius that gave the clock its lasting appeal. In a lightbulb moment they dreamed up and copyrighted a trade mark for their imported clock. Just one word changed its fortunes.

Anniversary

A clock that needs winding only once a year? Brilliant. Call it an anniversary clock and it becomes the perfect gift or memento for any occasion that can be marked annually – wind it annually on birthdays, wedding anniversaries, christenings and the rest. The idea caught on and they sold in their tens of thousands.

Admittedly, during the two world wars sales virtually stopped – German goods were not in high demand in the US and, besides, German factories had been converted to support the war effort. But the anniversary clock had another heyday in the early 1950s, tapping into a time of post-war prosperity and sentimentality.

Price isn’t everything

Riding the 1950s wave, one New York and Philadelphia department store made a single order for 75,000 clocks, confident that if the price was cheap enough they would sell.

*Cleaner and, despite some pitting, good to go.*

There’s another marketing lesson here. Price isn’t everything in the fickle world of sentimentality. Sadly, the cheapness of the clock detracted from its appeal and ruined the market for others. The store closed, the manufacturer filed for bankruptcy and the popularity of the anniversary clock went into steep decline.

For the swinging sixties and beyond, the old romance of the anniversary clock had largely lost its appeal. By the mid-1980s there were only three manufacturers of key-wind anniversary clocks.

But these days there are still lots of them around – hardly surprising since an estimated 15 million were manufactured during the 20th century.

Nostalgia – year after year

They frequently turn up in auction rooms across the UK in various states of neglect and disrepair. You can almost guarantee that the suspension spring – individual to each maker and model – will be broken and need replacing. The gilded metal base will be worn and tarnished.

But properly serviced and carefully restored, they carry a nostalgic appeal, year after year. I didn’t used to like them, but having worked on them, I do now.

The clock in the pictures

It is a German movement, by a maker called Kieninger and Obergfell. The brand name, Kundo, comprises the K of Kieninger und the O of Obergfell. It was made between 1920 and 1945 – the style of numbering on the dial would suggest perhaps the late 1920s or 1930s. Kundo did not put serial numbers on their clocks after WW2 so that fixes the latest date it could have been made. The glass dome is made of a single piece and is intact.

There are all sorts of forums to help you identify the maker, age and even value of your anniversary clock. If you want to start a dialogue with the dedicated aficionados, look here.

Fantastic foxes – fascinating fox facts

A fox can hear a ticking watch from a distance of 60 feet. The cacophony of ticking and chiming from my clock workshop – my growlery – would prove deafening. But there are more extraordinary facts about foxes that deserve a mention.

Lester the fox takes breakfast — Lester the friendly fox takes breakfast

It is so good to have the company of foxes in our garden. This year’s cubs have survived despite the noisy departure of their caring mum in midsummer when they were still tiny. Initially she would take food down to them in the den at the bottom of the garden. Vixens eat and then regurgitate food for their young. Later, before she disappeared, she would bring the cubs up to the house and watch protectively as they fed from the bowl.

And now young Lester is a regular visitor, more so than his two siblings who make only occasional appearances. None of them however are a patch on their great great grandmother, Fifi, who would leap up at the window to let us know she was around. Fifi would venture into the house to take sausages from your hand.

Sweet-smelling or sweat-smelling trainers?

Sometimes, when all the doors were open in summer, she would pop her head around the lounge door to gently remind us of her presence. We miss her stealing the boys’ sweet-smelling (well to a fox I guess they must be) trainers from the hallway and hiding them in the undergrowth like precious treasure.

Lester breakfasts with us. He sits patiently under the far tree. He doesn’t rush once we have put his food out. He’s content to watch and wait right up until the cluster of bickering magpies threaten to steal his fare. Being magpies, they fuss and skeeter, spending more time chasing each other away from the food than actually eating it. And Lester stalks his way up the lawn, using the wide trunk of near lime tree as cover. He circles the bowl then dines at leisure before heading off towards the den, always marking the same spot in the laurel bushes as he saunters home.

Those fascinating facts

So here are some extraordinary facts about foxes.

Ours are just three of an estimated 33,000 urban foxes. There are 225,000 rural foxes.

425,000 cubs are born each year but most don’t survive their first twelve months. Almost all die before their fourth birthday. Despite rural culls, the biggest cause of death amongst urban foxes is contact with cars or trains.

*Fifi loves egg custard but is equally happy with salad or the boys’ trainers.*

Foxes breed once a year, in January and February. The vixen is on heat for three weeks, but only properly fertile for three days.

Foxes can double the amount of light their eyes let in for night time hunting.

They can sprint at up to 30mph in pursuit of a rabbit.

But they prefer to hunt by stealth, listening then pouncing, like a cat. And here is the remarkable thing. They mostly pounce from a north easterly direction. When they do, they achieve a 73% killing rate. If they pounce from the south west, they achieve a 60% success rate. From any other direction, their success reduces to on average 18%.

Czech biologist, Cerveny, suggests the fox is uniquely using the Earth’s magnetic field as a range finder to make a more accurate pounce on where the sound is coming from. By finding the spot where the angle of the sound matches the slope of the magnetic field, the fox knows how far away the sound is and so precisely how far to jump. Other creatures may use magnetic fields to calculate direction; foxes, he says, use it to estimate distance.

Lester, however, needs no sophisticated range finder to locate his breakfast. A simple whistle and a tap on the side of his bowl brings him out onto the lawn in readiness. And as he makes his way towards his morning meal, another mouse or vole breathes an appropriately quiet sigh of relief at another day survived.

Find out more

I am totally indebted to John Lewis-Stempel for the fascinating and extraordinary facts about foxes. Go out and buy his book The Wild Life of the Fox (Doubleday, Penguin Random House 2020. £9.99). But please buy it from your local independent bookshop.

Pick of the Clocks? More ‘Clock of the Picks’!

Every clock has its own story to tell. Sometimes though, getting them to talk proves challenging. Take this one – clues galore it would seem, but before I strike lucky, before I can tick boxes in its time line, it stops. I need the help of some ancestry detectives.

There is such a nostalgia surrounding clocks. Just the look of this one takes me back to my grandparents’ terraced house in Leicester. They too had a mantel clock with barley twist pillars. There, above the open fire on the tall wooden mantelpiece it stood, chaperoned by horse-brasses and a clutter of incongruous glassware and pottery. It took pride of place and, I recall, it too had a little brass plaque marking my grandfather’s time served as a bespoke tailor.

Irresistible mystery

So when I saw this clock at a Devon auction house, it was hard to resist.

It was in a sorry state, grubby and unkempt. One of the feet had fallen off. The movement teetered precariously on its rickety wooden platform and rattled ominously inside the case. The clock showed no signs of life.

I didn’t mind. To be fair, that excited me all the more. I dismantled and examined it. There was nothing much wrong with it that a modest investment of care and a good clean wouldn’t put right.

All the time I was working on it, the case sat on my workbench and the plaque glinted and beckoned alluringly, with its irresistible mystery.

“Presented to G W H PICK
On the occasion of his marriage
Dec 15th 1923
By his friends at
BABWORTH and AUCHNAFREE”

I manage to track down some wedding details.

If I have the right one, he went by the name of Walter and his new wife’s maiden name was Atkins. They married in the parish of Williton in Somerset.

Initially, I thought that Babworth and Auchnafree must have been a manufacturing business. It sounded a bit like an engineering company.

The past is a foreign country

It makes sense that his work colleagues would pool their resources to buy him a wedding gift. Odd, perhaps, that they would use only his initials and offer the gift to him alone and not jointly to the happy couple. But protocols change. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

What of Babworth and Auchnafree? A quick Google search links the two. The correspondence address for Auchnafree Estate Company is Babworth Hall in Retford, Nottinghamshire.

And it quickly becomes apparent that my initial surmise is off the mark.

Engineering company my foot! It seems they own a fair bit of Scotland. Was Walter a Nottinghamshire lad, a young estate worker? Did he meet a girl from Somerset and marry in her parish?

I email the company secretary but receive no reply.

Working backwards

When researching history, perhaps the best idea is to start as near to the present as possible and work backwards.

On the inside of the clock case door there is a sticker, modern-ish, which references David Cooper. It bills him as a watchmaker of Sidwell Street in Exeter. That would link Walter’s clock with a man who married in the South West and who perhaps stayed there. Maybe they raised a family?

I am guessing that Coopers either resold the clock or, more likely, carried out some work on it. Possibly, from the handwritten reference number on the printed label, that was back in the year 2000.

I discover that David Cooper is still in business so email the business which has a retail and repair shop at the same Exeter address. Two months on, I have still heard nothing.

So, for now, the trail goes cold.

I’ll cope. As I’ve mentioned before, working with clocks has taught me to play the long game and learn the art of patience. Time will deliver, I am sure. In the meantime, it keeps perfect time and strikes with satisfyingly deep resonance on the half hour and the hour. It is good company.

Calling all ancestry detectives

But it would be such a joy to reunite the timepiece with descendants of GWH Pick who might treasure its sentimental value as an heirloom, albeit one with little monetary worth. For now though, I have no idea who they might be.

So if anyone who has time on their hands and fancies themselves as an ancestry detective wants to take up the challenge, please feel free to join in the search. You now have as much information to work with as I do. Let me know how you get on. I’ll be happy to be told I am entirely wrong.

The yes-no interlude

And once again, writing about the clock and its plaque takes me back to my own warm memories of my grandparents’ house where, in the early 1960s, through the comforting fog of Ogden’s St Bruno Flake, we all huddled round a rented 405-line black and white TV. Beneath the ticking clock we thrilled to contestants playing the Yes-no game and we screamed at the players to ‘open the box’ or ‘take the money’ while Michael Miles invited contestants – in what seems now like an alarmingly cheap and primitive game show – to ‘Take Your Pick’.

Matters of life and death – a winter walk

stoat, picture courtesy of Jon Ox Noble Photography

Saturday mid-morning in late November – daughter Sophie and I set off from a deserted Cold Kirby heading along the Cleveland Way towards Rievaulx on a dry but overcast and heavy-under-foot 9.5 miler, enjoying each other’s company and Baggy’s, the beautiful black labrador who revels in the adventure of new territory. His unadulterated joy for life is inspirationally contagious.

On the Friday evening I had been out of sorts, thrown slightly in the way old people are by a late change in plans. I know to fight that ‘set in your ways’ syndrome and to embrace spontaneity. I quickly adjusted.

Leaving a legacy

Walking begets talking – an observation worthy of another blogpost – and we did, covering so many topics including, without any mawkishness, the important subject of death and preparation for it. It gave me scope to talk about legacy, about being happy to melt back to dust on the one hand, and accept at some point, though not now, that the time will come to do just that. But at the same time I acknowledged the desire to leave a mark, to hope that there might remain some kind of legacy – to affirm that once upon a time I was here and hopefully made a difference, however small.

Nonchalance personified

We met only seven people on our four hour expedition, albeit two of them twice. Later though, at the end of our walk as we drove away towards the visitor centre at Sutton Bank, the road teemed with folk – families mostly whose ambitions stretched no further than a mile from base.

Early in our adventure we encountered a red legged partridge, sitting like a small boulder on the clay mud track. Baggy, adept at chasing distant pheasant, less good at catching them, sniffed but decided against killing. He tried to look nonchalant as we approached it while he stood guard. It was the first of several injured birds, both partridge and pheasant, the collateral damage of the previous day’s shooting party, left to die a slow lingering death or be savaged by night time foxes. It was shocking to think of the ignorant disregard of these so-called ‘sportsmen’, incapable of shooting accurately enough to kill and utterly careless of the result of their failure.

The Chase

Six miles in, beyond Rievaulx, having passed through a remote and ramshackle farm complex, we watched as a stoat chased down a rabbit, a long pursuit but one always with only one inevitable outcome.

They raced into the next field from which we were separated only by a sparse and timeless gnarled hawthorn hedge and rotting wooden fence. We witnessed the stoat tumble its victim to a halt, listened to the rabbit’s high pitched squeals as the predator bit into its neck, watched the interminable twitches and desperate yet increasingly forlorn efforts as the rabbit tried to escape, its very life dependent on it. A dozen or so sheep and three geese looked on attentively from a distance, like spectators at a cross country event or a car crash, until at last the rabbit lay still and the stoat stood upright, baring its white chest and flicking its long black-tinged tail in self-satisfied triumph.

The sheep lost interest and turned away. We stayed briefly to see the stoat, a third the size of its prey, try to drag the rabbit from the open ground in which it had met its fate.

In the moment

We were cold, from the stillness I think, but perhaps also from the moment. And as we turned away to continue our walk, contouring the hillside above the stream, beneath the trees to our left we watched in awe as two young deer, uncharacteristically dark, bound silently and effortlessly over the border fence and into the welcoming safety of the sparse November woods.

Baggy, nonplussed by the spectacle, resumed his futile efforts to catch distant pheasant, looking slightly embarrassed after each failed foray as he trotted back to us across wet sloping fields.

For more posts about the North Yorkshire Moors click here .

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Some interesting facts…

Stoats and weasels are found throughout mainland Britain. However, Ireland is solely home to stoats where, just to confuse matters, it is often called a weasel. Both species live in woodland and most other habitats provided there is sufficient cover to hide in and plenty of rabbits, rodents and birds to eat.

A preference for hunting rabbits means you are perhaps more likely to spot a stoat in the open. But, like weasels, they spend most of their time under cover to avoid larger predators such as foxes and birds of prey.

To see how to tell the difference between stoats and weasels, click here.

For more about stoats, click here.

…and some shocking statistics

Up to 146,000 pheasants, 5,300 red grouse and 38,300 red-legged partridges are shot every day in the UK, during their respective hunting seasons.

With so many guns shooting quickly at so many birds, wounding is common. According to a 2015 shooting industry survey, 76% of shooters were unable to accurately gauge distance, with 10% thinking the target was twice as far away. This inability to judge distances results in up to 40% of birds being wounded, rather than killed outright, according to a former training officer at the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. Many are left to die slowly when they are not retrieved by people or dogs.

extract from The League Against Cruel Sport website.

History – maybe it’s all just smoke and mirrors

I’m reading Hilary Mantel’s ‘The Mirror and the Light’ and loving it. Or should it be called ‘The Smoke and the Mirrors’? I become increasingly conscious that history is not all it at first appears to be. Indeed, some of it may not even be real.

light on derwent water

If ever you thought you could perhaps pen a novel, reading Hilary Mantel will convince you that you probably can’t. She writes so beautifully. She makes the most intimate detail sparkle whilst never losing track of the complex interwoven tapestry of plot. Sometimes her descriptions stop you on the page and you have to just sit, breathless, and soak up their beauty and richness. That is a rare talent.

Immersed in the meticulously researched history she describes, of conversations and glances, of personal reflections and dark thoughts, I find myself irritated by the introduction of what she admits are invented characters – an intrusive servant perhaps or an illegitimate daughter. Why, I wonder, spoil the factual portrayal of important moments in history by ‘making up’ extraneous characters?

So compelling is the rest of her writing that it takes time for me to realise my folly.

Did I bring the milk in?

This is fiction. Those historic conversations and angst-ridden musings by which I am so convinced – they are made up too. The characters may be real. But those private moments of confession or intimacy? She can’t know they happened. She can only surmise motive on the part of the king, or imagine the anxieties of the brilliantly portrayed Cremuel. Those musings that Henry VIII, Ann Boleyn, Norfolk or Cramner reveal in the pages of her books were never actually thought. They are in her imagination, not in ‘real’ history at all.

You don’t have to be a Mantel reader to spot it. You are surrounded by examples elsewhere. David Olusoga does it all the time in his excellent TV series ‘A House Through Time’. When he doesn’t have evidence for something, he simply makes it up. “Looking down the bleak hallway of 121 Grove Street, poor Annie Orphan must have thought, ‘What does my life hold?’” And we happily go along with it.

But really? Must she? How does David know? She might have been thinking, “I wonder what historians will make of this house in 100 years’ time” or “Did I bring the milk in?”.

Perhaps we are no better

Don’t get me started on Netflix’s ‘The Crown’.

But now that I understand what’s going on, I can happily forgive Hilary Mantel her invented characters just as easily as I embrace her invented encounters and those illuminating, imagined conversations between real characters. It all adds wonderfully to the richness of the picture and it engages us, utterly.

And I wonder too, as we think back over our own histories, how much of what we remember is imagined. Or how much of what we attribute as motive or hidden thought in others is actually just driven by our desire to support the narrative we choose to create.

That worrying moment of no return…

There comes a time when you have to take the plunge. It is that worrying moment of no return.

Ansonia drop dial wall clock — *Once dismantled, will all those parts go back together again?*

There it is. Exposed, out of its case, separated from its hands and face. One plate is removed and everything is just about holding in place, for now. Thankfully you have remembered to let down the power on the springs so that all that pent up energy contained in their wound coils has been released. That way, as you start to dismantle the mechanism, it won’t come to bite you back.

And they are all there, all the bits that go together to make something which is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Now is the time to take things apart, mindfully dismantle, inspect, resolve flaws, clean and nurture. There will undoubtedly be a point when all those components sit on the workbench, a puzzling array of disparate bits, and the fear kicks in that you will simply never remember how they all go back together.

One of life’s simple pleasures

Another time I’ll write about how dismantling and reassembling clocks has taught me the art of patience – of quite literally ‘taking time’. But here, suffice to say that one of the beauties of clocks is that they comprise elements all of which have their rightful place. With applied patience, they do fit together, they connect, perfectly. The sense of achievement at the point at which those wheels once again interlock and turn each other in turn is one of life’s simple euphoric pleasures.

And as with so many things in life, by gently, sensitively taking them apart with care – inspecting, refreshing and reassembling – you get a better understanding of what makes them tick.

To see the clock whose movement is pictured above, click here

Putting a name to a face – and why it matters

In the mid to late eighteenth century, it didn’t seem to matter too much. Neddey Wells, Neddy Wells? When it comes to a name, what is an extra or a missing ‘e’ amongst friends?

Nowadays it seems to matter almost too much. Get one digit wrong in an email address and the dreaded ‘your email did not reach some of its intended recipients’ message is only moments away from gracing your inbox. Make a mistake keying in a URL and you find yourself not immediately where you intended to be. Instead you are perhaps shepherded to safety by that watcher and manipulator of all things – Google – and asked ‘ did you mean….?’.

It still strikes me as odd though. Neddey Wells of Shepley. Here was a man who, back in the 1770s, engineered clock movements with a craftsman’s precision. As a result of his skill, clocks he made before the French Revolution and the start of the American War of Independence still work today, two and a half centuries later.

Detail matters

To the 18th century clockmaker, detail clearly mattered. A fraction of a fraction of an inch out on any component in a clock movement and the whole thing wouldn’t work.

Look at the symmetry of the clock hood with its beautifully fluted wooden pillars and its balanced broken swan neck pediment. Then look at the engravings on the face of Neddey Wells’ brass dialled clocks. They are so ornate, so beautifully wrought, so artistic. Whether he did his own engraving or bought in dials from specialists, it clearly mattered that it was right.

But seemingly it didn’t worry Neddey that his name was spelled in at least two different ways on clocks that survive to this day. Even if he couldn’t himself read, he would have been conscious, surely, of the difference between what he saw on one face and what he saw on another?

What’s in a name?

There is so much I don’t know. We know so little of the life of Neddey Wells, and what we think we know seems contradictory. That is another story entirely. But the name so often provides the starting point for finding out more.

My researches around the subject have unearthed fascinating details about members of his family and their lives but precious little about the man himself. Yet his presence is so palpable each time the clock he crafted strikes the hour with unerring reliability and its ring echoes lastingly in my home.

What I do know for certain is this. On longcase clocks, names matter.

When Frederick James Britten first published his Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers in 1894, he fulfilled that desperate yearning in clock lovers to know something more about the character behind the clocks they owned. G.H. Baillie and Brian Loomes in turn have continued the work with missionary zeal. Their books, even in this digital age of universally shared knowledge, are must-have fixtures on the clock-lovers’ bookshelves.

Transcending time

Longcase clocks exude character. They were each individually crafted by individuals whose own personalities shaped their masterpieces’ personalities. And every evening, as I pull the cord which lifts the single weight which drives the thirty hour movement which turns the hands – just as so many before me have done these past 250 years – I look the man in the face and know that, however he spells his name, his legacy transcends time.

Butterflies – the Yorkshire Moors and the question of destiny

Coming out of lockdown, the Yorkshire Moors and the Yorkshire Wolds have never looked so stunning. And for me, a bit of a birdwatcher, the new revelation has been butterflies. They might always have been there but I see them now through new eyes.

Standing on the Cleveland Way above Kepwick and looking out across the Vale of Mowbray to the eastern edge of the Yorkshire Dales is spectacular enough at any time. To do so as the sun is setting over the far hillsides whilst six kestrels hang in the updraft above you, hunting prey on the scarp slope, is something else.

It all gave such a sense of freedom and space after months exercising only on the flat expanse of Ouse floodplain. (Yes, I know, hardship is relative so please understand I am really, really not complaining).

Peacocks and ringlets

It was on my first post-lockdown walk, up from Kepwick then along the ridge towards Osmotherley (such a splendid Yorkshire twang to it, that place name), that I began to notice them – bright, colourful, and strangely deliberate in their movement. Mostly they were peacocks and small tortoiseshells I later discovered. But by the time I had headed off the ridge and down through forest to the valley floor again, I was struck by another. This was less spectacular in its brightness – soft brown but with remarkable eyespots and a sort of glowing translucence around the edges of its wings. It waited, on foliage, letting me come close as if it took delight in posing for pictures. A ringlet.

Later still, on the Wolds, it was the common blue, gatekeeper, marbled white and the green veined white that captivated me. And of course the peacock with its startling pattern of eyespots, designed to ward off or confuse predators.

At the mercy of the wind

To think, for all these years I had believed that such delicate creatures had no control over their destiny or direction. I thought that being so light and frail they travelled merely at the mercy of the wind, blown wherever the breeze took them. Now, I discover, they have purpose. Monarch butterflies have been tracked flying 3000 miles in directions of their own choosing. The painted lady can fly 100 miles in a day, at speeds of up to 30mph. York scientists have discovered that it migrates an incredible 9000 miles but it takes six generations to make the journey. Now that is putting species before self!

The peacock, I learn, as I find one hibernating in the open case of a mantel clock on top of the bookcase in my growlery, isn’t a migrator but is largely nomadic. It lives for up to eleven months and wards off predators by rubbing its wings together to make a hissing sound. I listen hard but the ticking of a myriad of clocks drowns out the warning.

Fine, fragile, in control

As I walk, I will always delight at the call of the curlew or the scream of the oystercatcher, the soar of the buzzard or the busy fussy strut of the pied wagtail. I will relish the jumble of goldfinches chasing along hedgerows, the majestic lone yellowhammer on a telegraph wire above stubble fields.

But now I have a new diversion – the spectacular, inspirational flight of butterflies making their way purposefully across the glorious Yorkshire landscape.

And the reassurance of knowing that even something so fine, so fragile, so delicate, can still control its own destiny.

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