They say a change is as good as a rest. Personally, I think that’s nonsense — there’s probably nothing better than sipping a coffee while munching frozen dark chocolate digestive biscuits. (If you haven’t tried frozen digestives yet, you should. No, really.) Lately, I’ve stepped away from making my 31" Copper Pan Rack with 8 Hand-Forged Hooks to spend time modifying old mantel clocks.
I've made several of these over the years. All of them mostly from the early 1900's era. A clock smith told me that many of these clock styles were given to retirees as a gift for long service. And I'm not sure what to think about that really; on the one hand it seems measly, on the other its was a quent tradition which still continues today i suppose with a bit of a office party (at the end of the working day), the manager/ceo speech followed by a handshake with a £20 Amazon gift card. Which is probably spent on a injection molded novality duck plant holder from a factory which used to be located in the West Middland (or Mid West for American readers) but now resides in China because the owners could make more money. So these clocks are literally time capsules, little fragments that pip not only nostalgia, but tangible points in history when things were built to last.
When steampunking these clocks, i think about the person to whom the clock was gifted: images of large stocky men with calloused hands, sharp witted minds, wide vocabularies and elongated pronunciations of their Rs. Oh the old English R. It was a semi vowel once, no? The Americans kept it—God bless ’em. Or rather, God bless the rural west countrymen and Irish emigrants who baked it into the accent. Shame, such a lovely sound it makes when pronounced correctly. To pretentious for someone of my ilk to use now. Yet, I once watched this documentary interview of an old lady who was born in the Victorian age. She was well past 100 and filmed in the 1970s. Of working class stock she was, her Rs were beautiful. And the vocabulary would put a modern day posh woman to shame. Now our females, British ones that is (and some Americans too), have taken to drawn out Os and lethargic As as an acoustic emphasis of disinterest.
Anyway, that's the kind of things that wonder though my mind while building these Dr Who type clocks. And more besides. Because they take a long time to build, 15-20 hours. So if i sold one for a £100 i'd be looking at a £5-7 hourly rate, add in the overheads of electricity, gas, copper, brass and the cost of the clock itself (£30), we're looking at £3 per hour. I should consider offshoring my workshop.
These clocks may not be cost-effective, nor fashionable in the traditional sense. But they're time-travelling talismans. And in a world full of injection-moulded duck planters, that counts for something.
REM(Node: Mockery.Nostalgia) = || Timepiece.Ritual.CopperThread ||
