WELCOME TO MY WORLD

WELCOME TO MY WORLD

One of my favourite watches.

We humans always like to welcome new members into our various clubs, and I'm as willing and enthusiastic as anyone else to do exactly that, which is why I welcome such smiling and benevolent characters as Mormon or Christian Scientist missionaries when they knock my door, not that they do that very often these days – they've probably heard that it's dangerous for men in possession of an absurd faith to get into a learned conversation with little me, or they are getting fewer and further between as a consequence of an increase in rational thought. Anyway, the whole conversation that may ensue is fair enough because we're both playing the same game. They want to convert me and I will (given long enough) convert them.

It's the same in other walks of life, and you're always welcome to my club.

I've got a sort of addiction to things that wind up.

This machine works really well, has astounding volume fort something that is little more than a horn, and runs at a constant speed.

I love old gramophones and the wonderfully primitive way they reproduce sounds even though a decent MP3 player sounds quite a percentage better. So I might drool and dribble as I extol the virtue of a 78 rpm recording of King Elvis which scratches its way through his Jailhouse Rock and listen with supreme indifference to the same track from a modern MP-something player with its crystal-clear intonation and undistorted range of musical tones. So I have hundreds of old recordings |(from the 1950s), though I'm prepared to share the following snippet with you: I hardly ever listen to any of them. The machines wind up and work and the music plays as well as it ever did, which the cynical might suggest wasn't very well, , and that's all I really care.

Then take time. It's no secret that I have a penchant for clocks and watches, of which there are two main varieties: either clockwork (where the word comes from, for goodness' sake) and quartz, though there are a few hybrid mechanisms in which a battery keeps a spring wound up, and that spring drives the clock. It's basically clockwork with the heavy duty work taken out! So I spend quite a bit of my time winding things up. I have clocks that need winding daily, others that last for a week and a couple more that only need winding up on a monthly basis. And, of course, quite a lot of staunchly reliable and accurate quartz clocks that rarely need any attention at all until they catch me out by requiring a change of battery. Like the old gramophone, though, I get all weak at the knees when I think of my clockwork clocks (and watches – I have some of those, too) and can dismiss the more accurate quartz ones with barely any acknowledgement of their worth.

This clock is a particular favourite because it's beautiful and yet I bought it from the manager of the Sibsey Trader Windmill in Lincolnshire, a clock and (joy of joys) windmill enthusiast.

Finally, and with a shuddering heart after glancing at the last photograph, I love windmills, real ones rather than the modern affairs that generate electricity - mills rather than turbines, that is. You don't have to wind them up, of course (think of the power a spring would need to grind the tons of wheat into flour that a decent windmill gets through every day), but they are sort of related in my mind. Nature does the work, the winds that blow even gently can produce enough flour for a fair few loaves of bread! And they rotate, don't they? Clockwise?

It only seems right and proper that, if I'm going to include an illustration of a windmill, it should be the Sibsey Trader Windmill, where I bought the aforementioned clock.

So we have springs that, when put under tension, store the strength of my muscles and then release it slowly, either to play a record or move a couple of hands around a clock or watch face, and we have the wind that contains within it enough raw power to grind massive stones together when those stones weigh tons!

I must remember those things next time the missionaries knock my door. I must remember to explain that they work according to well-understood natural laws that always have and always will be in place, and not a breath of magic anywhere! And they'd be welcome into my club any day, to listen to strains of scratchy 1950s rock 'n' roll and the sonorous bongs of my clocks on the hour. And if they're amenable I might even offer them a slice of bread filled with the goodness of the wild, wild winds.

© Peter Rogerson 19.04.11