Clockwork

It’s probably time to pack this away now. I won’t get it finished, which saddens me more than I expected. I had hoped we would be further along by now, given what we know. I look at the intricate tools I have laid out here on my bench and can but lament. My old eyes move from the lamplight, look past my lens and stare out into the night. Beneath the indifferent, timeless stars stands the aged forest, now marked. The dark hides the stakes, the tape, but I know what it means. I hear the owl, the bird of nighttime, beginning its hunt.

There’s a poetic irony in a person fixing an instrument that measures time, especially at my age. Why does one defy planned obsolescence? It’s hard not to see or feel the steady, comforting rhythm of order and passage. Life has a rhythmic presence, or so I used to think. A clock on the wall, passed down through generations, my grandfather wound it every Sunday night, a small ceremony he never explained and I never asked about. Now I wish I had. It is a reminder, a preservation of a lost art, and it has always been central to this home. At least to this home. There is an immense sense of satisfaction in fixing and ending the silence. It is the silence that concerns me, the lack of outrage. Another silence, too, outside, that I have grown just as used to not investigating. The stakes went into the ground a month ago, and I said nothing to anyone. Did nothing.

It’s delicate work. When the instrument stops, you investigate, you examine and attempt to establish what has gone wrong. Why the silence? Do others not hear the silence too? Not investigate? Is the mainspring worn out? Are the gear teeth misaligned? Is the escapement improperly adjusted? There can be no quick fixes, of that I am aware. There are no spare parts; they have long since gone, forgotten or been discarded. Or used up. But how to fabricate the missing parts? What are the elements and how to forge them? These are skills I have yet to acquire.

There must be a path through, a connection to the maker. I have heard it said that restorers often find hand-filed markings, or signatures, signs to interpret. And in that is the awe. To realise that centuries ago artisans created mechanisms accurate to within seconds of a day using hand tools and fire. 

Using the elements, that’s the key. Natural resources. I miss the ‘cu-coo’ sound. The sound is produced purely by air and physics using two small wooden whistles and air bellows inside the clock case. On the hour, if the winds were hushed and the trees motionless, the forest birds would still and listen and cock their heads to the side. The flow of the forest, the hatchlings, and the rhythmic clock.

Nothing is truly final. Time flows. Is time not seasons, migrations, a life’s passage? Time cannot be neutral. Clock menders understand this. Time is something with weight, direction, and high moral stakes.

The synchronisation with the clock’s bird is ingenious. The bellows, two small leather-and-wood accordions mounted on top of wooden whistle pipes, but the leather, so fragile, so easily damaged. So many fine threads working together. The whistle pipes were a bit easier, hollow wooden tubes equipped with a notch like a tiny recorder. I learnt to play the recorder at school and then gave it up. I wonder why? I regret the oversight now. My mother kept encouraging me. I should have listened and attempted to understand and not given in to the silence.

I gently push the minute hand forward with my thumb. The pin engages, lifting the fragile lever. Such a small pin and so essential. Hard to replicate, but worth the effort. This creates the first note by drawing air in. Gravity drops the heavy wooden top of the bellows, squeezing the trapped air out. This produces the high “Cu” note. A split second later, a second lever operates the other bellows, which is connected to a longer (lower-pitched) whistle pipe. The air forces out through this pipe, producing the lower “-ckoo” note. Mimicking the natural world. But I worry that is all we have left: a puff of a wooden whistle, imitation, and a carved wooden bird. So easily drowned out.

Here in my hands, time is made visible. Less abstract than deadlines, calendars, and the dread of another Christmas or funeral. A clock takes that abstraction and turns it into gears, escapements. A thing to hold. Time tamed. Not tamed, maybe. Time understood? Appreciated. Certainly appreciated. These old clocks loving built to be lovingly rebuilt and rebuilt. To work on one is to hold a worldview where time is not cheap and cannot be discarded. We are but temporary custodians.

We menders know you can’t force a clock. They are delicate, easily broken, and springs unwind at their own rate. It either keeps time or it doesn’t.

We must respect the mechanical truth. To work, every gear tooth, pivot, and spring obeys immutable physical laws. Fixing it relies on submitting your mind to the natural reality rather than forcing a solution or finding an alternative mechanism.

And another truth, too. Modern life demands speed, efficiency, and instant gratification. Clock restoration demands the exact opposite: slowness, meticulous patience, and extreme care. By spending uncounted hours filing a tiny brass tooth by hand, the restorer quietly reclaims authority over their own time and for those who will inherit the instrument. Those with lives to come.

There are decisions to be made. To accept the wear and tear of the centuries, the records of lives lived, and simply ensure the mechanism lives. Stop the damage and return the clock to its rightful place. It’s a difficult choice. It’s hard to see where the clock sits in the weighting scales of time.

Is this an era of planned obsolescence? One where we can replace the instrument. Old clocks were never perfectly accurate. They had their own character, quirks, and authenticity. Something to take comfort in. Is this no longer the case?

When I envisage the scene, those makers of clocks, so very long ago, I see an elderly bearded gentleman, focused and working, apron and glasses on, squinting into the lamplight, intent and resolute. Intricate tools uniformly laid out. A craft of love and determined on absolute perfection. Or I can look again and see not a clock but wood carving from a tree, brass from copper and zinc. All coming together to function as one.

How does one preserve the story and restore agency? Has the speed of modern life reached such velocity that we don’t have the time or inclination? Surely, we reclaim time through labour and with labour restore the mechanisms? Human ingenuity still has a function today. It is not too late?

To look out of my window and see, really see, and know I must fix the clock. It cannot be unwound. It ticks, its silent ticks, regardless. Do we not look at the intricate of the seasons, marvel at the inner workings, and not lament the breakages? But I have run out of time. There will be no final strike for this forest, or for whatever’s still nesting in it, to listen to. I had the tools to investigate that silence too, and didn’t. There is only silence now.

I am leaving this place tomorrow, and I am taking my clock with me. Carefully wrapped. The cuckoo to be packed into a box I specially made. And I wonder, then, where does the stewardship go from here. The bulldozers move in tomorrow. The trees die, the animals die, and a data centre is born. A place that has no need, and no room, for anything that keeps mechanical time.