This morning, I overheard a woman at the shops saying, “It feels later than it is right now. I got up too early.” The clocks went back last night. It’s easy to wring hands about the low attention spans and ignorance of the TikTok generation, but this was not some dunkable offence.
The first thing I did this morning was reach up on tiptoes to the living room clock and unhook it from a wobbly nail sticking out of wall. I dialled it back an hour and put it back in place. Most years I don’t get round to doing this until about midday but this morning I felt oddly compelled.
Lots of people don’t have living room clocks, they have phones and smart watches and computers and all of those change by themselves. We live in a time where the clocks will go back or forward and some people won’t notice. They’ll notice that they woke up earlier than usual and that the day feels a bit later than it is. It might not even register in that specific a way – maybe things just feel a bit more out of sync and off-key. We’ve all had days like that.
A Moruslav Holub poem tells the tale of a clock shop owner who states that he sets the time by the sound of a cannon firing at the same time every morning – not knowing that the man who fires the cannon sets his watch by glancing at the display of the clock shop.
A clock is any contraption or substance that changes in a steady and predictable way, be it a fob watch or a potassium argon isotope. Humans are not watches. Time warps, stretches, shrinks and shatters throughout the course of a human lifetime or a human hour.
2025-10-26