And then there were clocks.

I would lie in my bed, as a child, listening to the city clocks on the hour.

Which is slightly surprising. The school where I was brought up, where my father was head master, is in West Road, a good ten minutes through his college and now my daughter’s, over the Cam to the Market Place. (Or rather more often, five minutes by bicycle over Garret Hostel Bridge and past our other daughter’s college. And now I think of it, past our youngest daughter’s college too, come this Michaelmas. Perhaps I should explain that I am the dunce in my family, having not finished my eduction in the city I love.)

And yet I distinctly remember hearing the clocks strike more-or-less together, ten minutes away through the wind though they be. Perhaps one of them was our own grandfather clock, downstairs in the hall.

Which strikes (so to speak) me as the more remarkable, now we have a number of chiming and striking clocks in our own house, and getting them to coordinate is the culmination of many years’ work, still ongoing.

We have a friend, a physicist, fascinated by pendula and all things horological, who comes round at least once a week and often several times, on his magnificent grocer’s bicycle with its enormous basket, and synchronises our clocks. 

One of which, for instance, was bought, defunct, by Serena in a car boot sale for a song and indeed its own song: it has not so much a striking (this is getting silly) face, as deep and resonant Westminster chimes to vibrate to the very bottom of your soul. When Shaun introduced me to the the Carpenters’ music he said Karen Carpenter had “a voice to fall in love with”, and Alexander said of Serena’s clock that with those sounds in your life, nothing else could really go very wrong.

I took it to our local clock-and-watch-menders, and they told me the cost of restoring it was so many times more than the worth of the clock itself that the only answer (short of buying another) was to find an amateur clock-mad enthusiast.

Which is where our friend Doctor Clock, the self-styled Clock Psychiatrist, comes in. To our hallway. On his striking (as it were) bicycle. Usually several times a week. For several years now.

And it is paying off.

Time (sorry about this) was, when the clocks – a good five or six of them – were only in sync on Sunday, just after I’d wound and set them, perhaps together for the next hour or so.

By Tuesday or Wednesday they would be so out of step that our musician son Ben, who has turned his potato-cellar bedroom under the kitchen into a very impressive recording studio, would be hard pushed to find more than a minute or two chime-and-strike-and-cuckoo-free in any hour, to record in.

But the other day, a Saturday no less, in other words at the very end of the clock-winding-and-setting week, I heard several of them chiming and striking the hour mostly within remarkable seconds of each other and all in the same half-minute or so.

(And, to answer your immediate objection, I believe they were all on approximately the same hour.)

I sent Dr Clk an immediate text and he was as excited as I was.

More to the point, it took me straight back to my childhood, lying in bed and listening to the city clocks marking the hour more-or-less together.

You’d think such an insistent telling of time passing might make you feel less, not more, secure. It had the opposite effect on me.

Yet more proof, if proof were needed, that sound is more important to me than madeleines.

Possibly because I’m not over-fond of madeleines.

(Ooh, and there goes one of them now, for nine o’clock! Followed by an ominous silence from all the others. Oh well, can’t win ’em all.)