The kitchen clock is four minutes fast

1The clock in my kitchen is four minutes fast. I know this, everyone who has ever stayed in the flat knows this, and yet every morning it does its job: I look at it, I see that I am late, and I hurry, and I am on time. A clock that everyone knows to be wrong should be useless. Mine is the most useful object in the room.

A lie that works

2I asked around, and almost everyone I know has a clock like it. My sister keeps her car clock seven minutes fast. A colleague keeps every clock in her house ten minutes ahead except the one in the bedroom, which is right, “so that I can sleep”. The baker in the street behind the market keeps the clock above his oven three minutes fast and has done so for thirty years, though he could not tell me why.¹1When pressed, he said the bread does not know what time it is, and neither, before the coffee, does he.

3What interests me is that the lie keeps working long after it has been discovered. You would think that knowing the clock is four minutes fast would let me simply subtract four minutes and relax. It does not. The subtraction takes effort, and in the first minutes of the morning I do not have effort to spare. The clock is faster than my arithmetic, and so it wins.

Time you can argue with

4I think there is something else at work too. A clock that is exactly right is an authority: there is nothing to say to it. A clock that is slightly wrong is a companion. It has a personality. You can argue with it, mutter at it, forgive it. It belongs to the household in a way that the time on a phone, which is correct to the second and the same for everyone, never will.

5Public clocks are meant to be right, and they should be. The ferry would be nothing without them. But the clocks we keep at home are allowed to be ours, and being ours, they are allowed to be wrong in our particular way.

6I have thought about setting mine right. I have decided against it. I would be four minutes late for the rest of my life.

Notes

1. When pressed, he said the bread does not know what time it is, and neither, before the coffee, does he. ↩