9) The Trouble with Reading Time

When it comes to some things, I'm a very slow learner. It takes me about three or four times on the wagon (e.g. drinking too much sangria) before I can lock a new concept in as Gospel, the way a septuagenarian virgin locks in the concept of celibacy while waiting for the one to come. 80% chance that at that age, no one's coming.  Sorry, sidetrack.

There is a 17% chance that when you were learning to read a clock, it created a traffic jam along the grooves of your brain.

80% of you would have been confused because, how on earth does a disc with numbers on it and three racing sticks, circuiting each other tell you what the colour of the sky is? Wouldn't it be easier to look outside and check with that authority on time (Mr Sun) what time it really is? We got it easy though. Imagine those Roman kids. Poor buggers.

20% of you however would have got confused about reading clocks, not because the disc and sticks and numbers thing was confusing, but because the very logic of time denotation is completely upside down.

Any kid with an overbearing sense of logic (and most have one - every three-year old in the world wants to know why you can have grown up juice and they can't and 'Because it's grown up juice,' just doesn't wash! Inversely, 'Why did you put poo on the wall?' is not rationally answered by, 'It was there!') so...Back to clocks.

How is it that the smallest hand on the clock denotes the hour of day? The mighty hour, disturbing concept to all children, to whom an hour is the most feckless stretch of time on earth (designed only for the benefit of oppressive adults) could be denoted by a short, stubby, embarrassing little hand on a clock face? In all that face space, shouldn't the hour get a little respect? Shouldn't the hour hand have been some phallic, Eiffel Tower-esque monolith to denote its class-monitorship of Time?

Everything else that's foremost in the world is celebrated, upsized. Army generals, memorials, great men and women, kids celebrating birthdays, kings, queens, Ronald McDonald - anybody who is anybody, or anything that is anything, gets a huge, big monument dedicated to them. You'd never see Winston Churchill commemorated so universally with a dainty little brooch or a midget-sized garden gnome in Trafalgar Square (despite the fact that a Churchill garden gnome would scare the living bejesus out of all dogs and English children). But for the commander-in-chief of the clock - the poor chappy gets embarrassingly stubby status. It boggles the brain.

And just to make him feel worse, the minute and second hand are constantly lapping the hour stump in their OCD-style paranoia - longer, thinner, fleeter of cog, giving him some obesity complex in the race to keep us up to date. It's like Churchill, Paris Hilton and Roger Bannister on a jogging track. Churchill would have them shot!  Well okay, maybe just Bannister.

Or maybe that's just it - the clock face is a ticking symbol of the world's hierarchy. The second hands, like the littlest people, facilitate the less-little people (the minute hands), making sure they're on time, in the right place and in the know of what's what for their section of responsibility.  And these less-little people make sure the least-littlest people (the mighty hours) are where they should be, saying and doing the right things so that we're all at the right place at the right time. And true to world logic, if the littlest or the little people strike, the whole system goes to pot. Kind of like British Airways. 

Maybe the second hands and batteries have an understanding, sort of like a union. As long as the batteries can keep it all together, the second hands are good to go. The minute someone's not getting enough juice, it's c(l)og up the works time. I wonder if some disgruntled Marxist employee with a sense of symbolic proletariat justice invented the clock. Either that or French lorry drivers were on hand to advise on the length and importance of each hand.  'Screw zat bloody hou-wer! E' may be important, but wizout us, e' is nothing!'

That still doesn't explain why the hour hand is stubby. Isn't he supposed to have his own office and a name plate on the clock face?

I am personally advocating that clocks should be built the other way round. If telling time means the hour comes first, the minutes later and the seconds last, their hands ought to be in height order.  Mainly so that this damn thing leading me to my grave or signalling the end of my detention, reads right.

And that's my excuse for taking forever to learn to read time, and I'm sticking to it.