This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
If you want to know how someone sees the world, give them a pencil. Right from an early age, we have a love of drawing. It's true that sometimes children's drawings can be a bit peculiar, but they are exactly how they view the world around them and there is something rather special about that. A few years ago, we bought a job-lot of books and bits-and-bobs at our local auction. There were some rather lovely things amongst them and, since they only cost a couple of pounds, they were better than bargainous! In them was a collector copy of a biography of the sculptor Alfred Gilbert, who famously created the statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus. As part of the book, there is a hand drawn sketch of one of his designs. It is somehow both messy and precise, giving an idea of how he worked through his ideas until the reached the desired conclusion. But this was not the greatest treasure in the collection - at least not for us! Buried in amongst the rest of the published and printed book...