Speaker 1: Hollo. I morecan stories all the time. Glad you are here,
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: On an April morning, more golden than expected, I found
Speaker 2: myself in the front room of the Lower Warren History Society,
Speaker 2: the odd sun filtering through the wavering green glass and
Speaker 2: catching itself in the dust. There's a certain privacy in
Speaker 2: retired life, even when spent among musty boxes and the
Speaker 2: quiet shifting of someone else's idea of order. For me,
Speaker 2: volunteering with archives meant less unearthing lost treasures and more
Speaker 2: labeling committee minutes, sometimes over tea with Missus Wainscott fretting
Speaker 2: gently beside me. What set this morning apart besides the
Speaker 2: smell of last year's festival bunting folded with near reverence
Speaker 2: on the side table was the angle of my chair,
Speaker 2: A small thing. Perhaps I'd shifted it closer to the
Speaker 2: tall window, so the great clock tower nearly filled my view.
Speaker 2: Its face was endlessly ornate, florid, overfashioned, with curls of
Speaker 2: wrought copper, and three gold black hands that moved with
Speaker 2: measurable intent, sweeping over blue enamel numbers. As the town
Speaker 2: was just exhaling from the rush of school drop off,
Speaker 2: I idly watched the second hand past twelve, then tuck
Speaker 2: itself above the broad too. Nothing seemed odd, nothing aside
Speaker 2: from my own aimless gaze, until the hand jerked minutely,
Speaker 2: and to my eye stuck a pause, not a halt,
Speaker 2: a lean of half an instant, like a dancer who
Speaker 2: lingers a touch too long in a pirouette. Then at twelve,
Speaker 2: the smallest version again a beat, catch release. It happened
Speaker 2: while the children streamed by, unbothered, jackets half pulled, and
Speaker 2: while Missus Wainscott composed a shopping list for just after ten.
Speaker 2: I shut my eyes, half smiling at the invention of
Speaker 2: a slow brain, or worse, the over indulgence of a
Speaker 2: retired one. But after a returning to the ledgers, I
Speaker 2: was haunted. It was the ordinary that had blinked at
Speaker 2: me at quarter past. I slipped out with the excuse
Speaker 2: of delivering a record to the pharmacy. A walk of
Speaker 2: two corners passed Missus Felsy's greenhouse and the town's only
Speaker 2: bus stop. Above the chemist's door, a glowing digital clock
Speaker 2: marked ten twelve. In the seconds that followed, I waited,
Speaker 2: feeling slightly foolish, before seeing it. The digits hung, not glitching,
Speaker 2: but breathing a full heartbeat longer than should have been
Speaker 2: a thrill. A gentle, private amazement ran through me. But
Speaker 2: it wasn't fear, not exactly disbelief, either, but a stubborn
Speaker 2: urge to make sense of this small defiance. Why did
Speaker 2: the clock stall for two on the tower on the
Speaker 2: high Street, even the school bell that would soon toll eleven?
Speaker 2: Could a mechanism across different designs agree to hesitate together?
Speaker 2: I almost laughed at myself then, but the sense of
Speaker 2: being on the cusp of some odd discovery weathered my skepticism.
Speaker 2: As I passed back through the square, I decided I
Speaker 2: wouldn't mention it, not yet, not to missus Wainscott, not
Speaker 2: to Mars at the bakery, not even to my niece,
Speaker 2: who'd surely blame it on provincial boredom. Instead, I returned
Speaker 2: to the diffused half light of the Society Room and
Speaker 2: watched once more as the clock performed its quiet stutter,
Speaker 2: waiting patiently for me to learn its secret. That morning
Speaker 2: is typical of Lower Warren, something quietly peculiar, hiding beneath ritual.
Speaker 2: I have lived my sixty five years here save a
Speaker 2: handful on the outskirts for teaching in another district. Even now,
Speaker 2: three years into retirement, I cannot help but narrate small
Speaker 2: histories to myself as I observed the town on my
Speaker 2: daily circuits. I split my mornings between tea and the
Speaker 2: Society's parlor, archiving birth announcements and the odd piece of
Speaker 2: civic ephemere and brief restorative walks across the square. My
Speaker 2: world is bordered by the physical clock faces embedded everywhere
Speaker 2: on the sharp, narrow steeple of Saint Helen s whose
Speaker 2: belly rang as a girl on the squat town hall,
Speaker 2: its roof scolloped with pigeon droppings above the bakery, round
Speaker 2: and faded, but still insistently marking time in blue lower.
Speaker 2: Warren's routines are affable and consistent, no great passion for punctuality,
Speaker 2: but enough coordination that the market opens precisely when needed,
Speaker 2: and the buses nudge away from the same curb, always
Speaker 2: within a minute or two of their posted slots. People
Speaker 2: hear prize practicality above all. If pressed, they would tell
Speaker 2: you the clocks are primarily for knowing when you've enough
Speaker 2: time for another cup. Missus Wainscott, I still struggle to
Speaker 2: call her. Marjorie, retired from her post as town postmistress
Speaker 2: three years before me, and now presides over the society,
Speaker 2: the parish jumble, and more gently, every one's comings and goings.
Speaker 2: She wears her hair in a swirl and folds her
Speaker 2: spectacles after each use with ritual precision. When we spend
Speaker 2: a slow hour leabling the archivist's endless backlog, she offers
Speaker 2: stories in careful doses and punctuates sentences with small there
Speaker 2: you are Then's born from decades sorting more than letters
Speaker 2: to Mars. By contrast, is the youngest fixture in the square,
Speaker 2: a Portuguese transplant who inherited the corner bakery when Booker's retired,
Speaker 2: and whose pride is in opening the doors at eight
Speaker 2: zero two every morning, a full two minutes after the hour,
Speaker 2: fresh from the oven. Never rushed, he says. Around that time,
Speaker 2: the bell from Saint Helen's rings once, and the first
Speaker 2: wave of parents and small children descend for bread and rolls,
Speaker 2: The smell of yeast a signal to begin the school.
Speaker 2: Bell itself, tiny stuttering, suspended insistently over the entryway marks
Speaker 2: the start of the day. At eight thirty two, not
Speaker 2: a minute sooner. The children line up fidgeting, and someone
Speaker 2: makes a joke about losing another shoe at the lucky minute.
Speaker 2: Central to this small theater is mister Leventhal, the society's
Speaker 2: closest thing to an expert by temperament and archivist by fate.
Speaker 2: A caretaker of dead men's papers, he dresses in wool
Speaker 2: jumpers year round, is perpetually off by a step or two,
Speaker 2: and cannot be relied upon to remember the precise date
Speaker 2: of his own wedding, much less the time. Still, the
Speaker 2: rest of us defer to him on the meaningful points
Speaker 2: of custom, when to schedule the annual clock winding ceremony,
Speaker 2: the proper color for bunting. Which year it was that
Speaker 2: Lower Warren's market day proved remarkable enough to merit a
Speaker 2: page in the ledger. The pattern of public time in
Speaker 2: Lower Warren is gentle but pervasive. The very cycles of
Speaker 2: civic life, parish meetings, bell ringing, the buses, lonely circuit
Speaker 2: are embedded in the spoken clock, but none speak of
Speaker 2: it with reverence. Children learn by osmosis to meet by
Speaker 2: the clock tower. Buses idle just a minute longer if
Speaker 2: a passenger is spotted running from the chemist's. The bakery
Speaker 2: churns out its trays perfectly in rhythm with open The
Speaker 2: market officially does not open on the hour, but at
Speaker 2: eight twelve people are almost superstitiously unconcerned with explanations. Life
Speaker 2: simply fits into these shapes. Every spring, the town stages
Speaker 2: its own odd play. At the heart of this system
Speaker 2: the celebration of the Clock, an overblown pageant that sees
Speaker 2: the mare in top hat and children in felted waistcoats,
Speaker 2: all clustered under the chattering clock tower as the brass
Speaker 2: band strikes up. The speech, delivered from yellowed script, celebrates
Speaker 2: the gift of time that binds us, the mechanism that
Speaker 2: sees us through each hour. Few listen. Most are negotiating
Speaker 2: cups of hot cider or angling for a better spot
Speaker 2: in the sun. The clock gets a special winding. Children
Speaker 2: are permitted to ring the hour, and afterwards to Mars
Speaker 2: gives away loaves to whoever can answer a question about
Speaker 2: famous minutes in town history. This embeddedness of time is
Speaker 2: curious once you look for it, but no one, not
Speaker 2: even I, would have called it odd. The pulse of
Speaker 2: the square is marked by these time pieces, not dominated
Speaker 2: by them. Their presence is comforting, anchoring in the endless repetition,
Speaker 2: Or so I always believed. That belief I now see
Speaker 2: was the first veil to fall. It had to be
Speaker 2: before I could begin to see what time was actually
Speaker 2: doing to us, one stuttering minute at a time. It
Speaker 2: was missus Wainscott who first offered me a contradiction, even
Speaker 2: as she didn't know she delivered it. We were sorting
Speaker 2: through a pile of battered time tables labeling bus routes
Speaker 2: for the Archive of Civic Convenience, a project no one
Speaker 2: but mister Leventhal truly cared for. I mentioned almost in
Speaker 2: passing funny to Mars. Never opens at eight, always at
Speaker 2: eight zero two. That must drive some of the early
Speaker 2: rises mad. She didn't even look up. Hasn't it always
Speaker 2: been like that? She said, easily as shrugging. Every one
Speaker 2: here likes a minute or two for themselves first, gives
Speaker 2: things time to settle. Don't you think? What struck me
Speaker 2: was her certainty to question It seemed almost impolite. Still,
Speaker 2: I found myself scanning the array of public schedules tacked
Speaker 2: up around the square. Parish meeting next Thursday, six twelve
Speaker 2: p m. Market Day announcements, doors open at eight twelve,
Speaker 2: Bellringer's rotor practice at seven twenty two, never at half past.
Speaker 2: It was as though some secret code determined the shape
Speaker 2: of every event, but nobody seemed aware the code existed
Speaker 2: at all. At the Society meeting that afternoon, mister Leventhal
Speaker 2: confirmed next week's extraordinary General Session should begin at three
Speaker 2: forty two sharp. When I asked if he meant half
Speaker 2: past or quarter two, he looked at me over his
Speaker 2: steaming mark. Now forty two, Yes, feels about right. More
Speaker 2: time to finish with lunch. No one laughed, least of
Speaker 2: all me. The more I listened, and the more I watched,
Speaker 2: the more clearly I saw the same silent choreography. Events
Speaker 2: nodded into life at two twelve or twenty two, sometimes
Speaker 2: thirty two, never at the round certain hours, I asked, gently,
Speaker 2: just to the edge of politeness, is there a reason
Speaker 2: for this? Responses ranged from blankness to the suggestion that
Speaker 2: people needed the grace of a moment or two. If
Speaker 2: pressed for precision, explanations faded away. A contradiction hung between
Speaker 2: what people did and what they thought about what they did.
Speaker 2: Everyone structured their life around these second minutes, but none
Speaker 2: could say why, even as they co ordinated year after
Speaker 2: year by its logic. I found myself suddenly helplessly curious.
Speaker 2: The pattern was too rigid to be habit too widely
Speaker 2: shared to be random. Had it always been this way?
Speaker 2: Was it deliberate? Or worse? Was there something in the air,
Speaker 2: some slow geologic shift of local mind that made us
Speaker 2: hesitate together and believe it natural? And if so, why
Speaker 2: did the clocks, different mechanisms all participate in the same, strange,
Speaker 2: nearly invisible ceremony. I could not stand not knowing the
Speaker 2: kind of curiosity that teachers hone. The dogged, methodical, slightly
Speaker 2: apologetic sort quickened in me, making the ordinary seam at
Speaker 2: last full of slant promise. By the third morning of
Speaker 2: my private investigation, curiosity had replaced confusion. I brought a
Speaker 2: note book and sat first at the window of the
Speaker 2: society stop watch, at the ready. At each minute ending
Speaker 2: in two, that is nine zero two, nine twelve, nine
Speaker 2: twenty two, and so on, I pressed the button. As
Speaker 2: the second hand neared its mark. The hand's motion would stall, always,
Speaker 2: as if the clocks spring caught on something unseen, and
Speaker 2: then shudder forward. My pulse embarrassingly did much the same.
Speaker 2: Was it visual illusion? I moved to the pharmacy, sitting
Speaker 2: on the cement step beneath the digital clock. The old
Speaker 2: ten zero two came, and with it a blink, a hitch,
Speaker 2: more subtle than before. Like the numbers paused to take
Speaker 2: a last look at themselves before continuing. To counter my imagination,
Speaker 2: I tried Saint helen s, whose clock mechanism was ancient
Speaker 2: electric restored in the nineties after a flood. The effect persisted,
Speaker 2: stubborn as the minute hand reached eleven twelve straight, unwavering
Speaker 2: than a subtle stutter, and yes, a barely perceptible lag.
Speaker 2: Before continuing in the same easy arc, I thought to
Speaker 2: time the paws itself. At the bakery, I waited for
Speaker 2: to Mars to bring out his cheese buns and use
Speaker 2: the stopwatch. Sometimes the pause was two point three seconds,
Speaker 2: sometimes one pointate. It changed with the clock, the weather,
Speaker 2: the hurry of the moment. On non second minutes, the
Speaker 2: motion was continuous, unremarkable. I wrote down the timings, hoping
Speaker 2: for a pattern, and instead found only contradiction. The delays
Speaker 2: were real, but slippery sometimes longer, sometimes shy of a second. Altogether,
Speaker 2: I measured, doubted, and measured again later as to Mars
Speaker 2: handed me a scone, I asked, pretending to speak of pastries.
Speaker 2: Do things ever feel slower to you at say eight
Speaker 2: o two? Or is that just me waiting for your oven?
Speaker 2: He grinned, flower in his hair. Everything is slow here,
Speaker 2: isn't it. That's why we start early and open late.
Speaker 2: He shook his head. No more explanation than that. At
Speaker 2: the next Society meeting, I watched as the committee prepared
Speaker 2: to vote on funding for a new exhibition. Just as
Speaker 2: the clock touched for twenty two, people seemed restless. Just
Speaker 2: before some fidgeted shuffling papers until the large wall clock
Speaker 2: signaled the right moment, and then all at once action
Speaker 2: raised hands a unanimous decision. I tried quietly to see
Speaker 2: if this happened every time a motion delayed until a
Speaker 2: second minute, and yes, more often than not, people unconsciously waited,
Speaker 2: as if for some private blessing. Seeking a new angle,
Speaker 2: I arranged to meet missus Chow, the oldest Society member
Speaker 2: and daughter of a family who survived both wars. In
Speaker 2: Lower Warren. She occupied a tiny cottage with an overgrown garden,
Speaker 2: and told stories carefully, as if she were sorting apples
Speaker 2: for bruises. I described, with as little editorializing as possible,
Speaker 2: how meetings were always quarter past two or twelve minutes past,
Speaker 2: rather than on the hour. She nodded, untroubled. I always
Speaker 2: thought we were blessed, she confided. My mother said, only
Speaker 2: fools hurry past a lucky minute. We'd always wait at
Speaker 2: the door before letters came. Never mind what the schedule said.
Speaker 2: Give the minute a chance, or it'll trip you up,
Speaker 2: she laughed. Superstitions, but good ones. More contradiction, a loose explanation,
Speaker 2: alive with tradition but empty of reason. Out of interest,
Speaker 2: I called my niece Beatrice, newly arrived from London, and
Speaker 2: told her to watch the clocks while she crossed the
Speaker 2: square on an Errand do you see anything odd at
Speaker 2: two or twelve past? I pressed? She snorted, Lord, Aunt Macie,
Speaker 2: they're all broken anyway, But I don't see anything strange.
Speaker 2: Time is time? Did you lose your watch? The sensation
Speaker 2: was akin to living inside a story visible only from
Speaker 2: one angle, a fairy tale half told depending on whose listening.
Speaker 2: Outsiders saw nothing, Locals believed unconsciously in a lucky minute,
Speaker 2: no one could explain, and the very clocks seemed accomplices.
Speaker 2: My list of contradictions had grown, the effect struck only
Speaker 2: those who had grown up here or grown used to
Speaker 2: the rhythms. The tradition was remembered in whispers, but never named.
Speaker 2: The clocks were warped, but only for us. Every event,
Speaker 2: great or small, seemed blessed or perhaps subtly manipulated by
Speaker 2: the second minute, unnoticed by the wider world. I could
Speaker 2: not help but feel I was sliding closer to a
Speaker 2: center that would refuse to hold. The more closely I
Speaker 2: interrogated the routines of my own days, the more unsettled
Speaker 2: I became, not with fear, but with a sense of excavation.
Speaker 2: My own planner, half forgotten in my bag, revealed a
Speaker 2: covert pattern. Tea with friends at ten twenty two, lunch
Speaker 2: at to Mars's at twelve twelve, exactly, appointments for the
Speaker 2: pension paperwork inexplicably at eleven twenty two. Not one meeting
Speaker 2: in the past year, save those forced by officialdom, had
Speaker 2: begun on the hour or half hour. Out of curiosity,
Speaker 2: I phoned missus Wainscott and proposed, uncharacteristically, shall we walk
Speaker 2: at four o'clock sharp? A pause on the line, she replied,
Speaker 2: let's make it four twelve. Shall we love makes getting
Speaker 2: out the door easier? Determined to break the spell, I
Speaker 2: submitted a meeting time for the book club six zero
Speaker 2: zero p m. Unvarnished. The committee responded quickly, let's do
Speaker 2: six twelve, if it's all right with you. When I
Speaker 2: asked why, the opinions varied. Seems kinder to not rush
Speaker 2: dinner gives me space to tidy up. Not one person
Speaker 2: found it unusual or worth discussion. I kept a record
Speaker 2: for a week asking people to join me for lunch
Speaker 2: at noon sharp. Never once did a meeting occur as planned.
Speaker 2: People arrived late, apologized, or simply suggested a little later
Speaker 2: twelve twelve say the pattern was absolute, yet the awareness
Speaker 2: of it was missing. That week, I watched myself try
Speaker 2: to resist it. Deliberately arrived early at the square for bread,
Speaker 2: but to Mars would not open until the familiar too.
Speaker 2: I tried to arrange a phone call for seven zero
Speaker 2: zero p m. Missus Chow called at seven twelve, serenely,
Speaker 2: as though her mind could not process a different rhythm.
Speaker 2: I grew convinced the second minute was not simply a
Speaker 2: marker of tradition. It had become a force more structuring
Speaker 2: than habit, an unseen hand channeling the workings of the
Speaker 2: town and its memories. Its shaped not just schedule, but
Speaker 2: decision recollection, possibly even community action. My mind circled the
Speaker 2: heart of the puzzle. Is the town's so organized because
Speaker 2: of a mechanical quirk or degenerations of tradition slowly bend
Speaker 2: the clocks into their current strange orbit. For all my notes, interviews, experiments,
Speaker 2: and stubborn skepticism, one fact remained resistant. The effect was
Speaker 2: deeper than quirk and could not be chalked up to chance.
Speaker 2: The second minute did not simply punctuate time here, It
Speaker 2: orchestrated it silently everywhere I looked. I became preoccupied. My
Speaker 2: mornings grew dedicated to observing the moment the clock slowed,
Speaker 2: my afternoons to scanning past ledgers for any record of irregularity,
Speaker 2: my evenings to charting out new tests. Propose something at
Speaker 2: nine zero zero, watch people guide it to nine zero two,
Speaker 2: never mentioning the drift. Human beings, I realized can acclimate
Speaker 2: to almost any oddity, provided it is shared. What was
Speaker 2: the cause and what the result? Was the moment engineered
Speaker 2: or did the town, through sheer force of collective will
Speaker 2: orchestrate its own small disobedience to perfect time? As the
Speaker 2: daylight hours lengthened, I retreated into the History Society's archives,
Speaker 2: determined to chase the thing to its source. There were
Speaker 2: crates of yellowed council minutes, bundles of festival rosters, binders
Speaker 2: bulging with photographs of the town's various incarnations. Most were,
Speaker 2: as I remembered from youth ceremonies, bunting strung between gaslights,
Speaker 2: children holding skewed clocks painted on cardboard for the celebration
Speaker 2: each spring. In the third cupboard, where someone had misfiled
Speaker 2: civic gifts, I found the first trace of a culprit.
Speaker 2: It was a letter, faded and brittle stuffed among programs
Speaker 2: from an eighteen eighty five clock tower rededication. The writing
Speaker 2: neat and demonstrating too much patience was from Horace Grundle,
Speaker 2: the original clockmaker. More than the signature, it was the
Speaker 2: line half way down the page that arrested me. The
Speaker 2: new clock is designed to grow at us each hour
Speaker 2: an extra moment to gather ourselves a gift of the mechanism.
Speaker 2: My heart slid in my chest for the first time.
Speaker 2: I wondered, could the pause be a designed feature, A
Speaker 2: deliberate offering. Next to Grundle's name was the phrase let
Speaker 2: it be a well spring, never to be hurried, written
Speaker 2: in a heavier hand. Further searching produced an annotated blueprint
Speaker 2: of the original mechanism. I do not claim to understand
Speaker 2: the technicalities, but the annotation near the two and twelve
Speaker 2: on the face showed a note slight delay, imperceptible insure
Speaker 2: mechanism lingers on minute and twelve. The design was not
Speaker 2: accidental at all, nor the result of some later quirk.
Speaker 2: It was systematically consciously placed at the heart of the
Speaker 2: town's greatest artifact. My hands shaking a little found a
Speaker 2: ledger entry town council minutes from the same year, celebrating
Speaker 2: the ingenious device and the blessing of the second minute,
Speaker 2: as crafted by Grundy's own hand, passed by acclamation to
Speaker 2: observe each hour's second as a moment for consideration. Later
Speaker 2: reading through the town's storied past, devastating fire averted at
Speaker 2: three thirty two, a famous compromise between two rival families
Speaker 2: concluded at seven twelve, the first radio broadcast marked in
Speaker 2: the record as cent at two zero two. I saw
Speaker 2: a pattern repeated with oppressive regularity. These minutes, always noted
Speaker 2: with a peculiar sense of pride, had accumulated a mythos Still,
Speaker 2: pride of artifact is different than living culture. I took
Speaker 2: what I had found back to the society meeting, reading
Speaker 2: the entries aloud to Missus Wainscott and mister Leventhal. Both
Speaker 2: blinked at the discovery. Missus Wainscott adjusted her glasses and said, only, well,
Speaker 2: tradition is tradition, isn't it. But it's a lovely thought
Speaker 2: the gift of a pause. Mister Leventhal, perhaps less certain,
Speaker 2: said unusual, but perhaps a clever clockmaker wanted us to
Speaker 2: mind the present moment. For the first time, I felt
Speaker 2: the town's routines, my own routines, come into focus, not
Speaker 2: as a vague accumulation of preference, but as the result
Speaker 2: of a chosen, purposeful strangeness. The pause was not a flaw,
Speaker 2: but a feature designed to slow the community for a breath,
Speaker 2: to anchor each hour with a gift of stillness. It
Speaker 2: was the mechanism itself, a tiny alteration to the body
Speaker 2: of time keeping, delicately imposed upon the life of an
Speaker 2: entire village. The rubbery line between custom, memory and reality
Speaker 2: slackened and danced. My sense of lower Warren shifted. What
Speaker 2: seemed accidental, eccentric, or trivial now revealed itself as a
Speaker 2: living echo of one man's idea. If the present delights
Speaker 2: in memory, then this, I thought, is how you shape it.
Speaker 2: I still did not understand whether the pores owned us
Speaker 2: or we owned it, but it was unmistakably ours. For
Speaker 2: three days after that meeting at the History Society, I
Speaker 2: found myself watching clocks as if I'd only learned their
Speaker 2: language for the first time. I carried Grundle's letter and
Speaker 2: blueprint around in my bag, along with all my careful notes,
Speaker 2: some scrawled in the margins of the Society's forms, some
Speaker 2: on the backs of bakery receipts. When I laid them
Speaker 2: out next to one another, the pattern took visible shape.
Speaker 2: Every pause, every lucky minute, every event scheduled at an
Speaker 2: odd time carried the signature of that singular decision from
Speaker 2: nearly a century and a half ago, But I also
Speaker 2: felt a new and urgent doubt. Had the mechanism over
Speaker 2: decades changed the way people sensed time, Had our community
Speaker 2: enfolded the pause into its rituals, or had we become
Speaker 2: imperceptibly engines for its propagation a living metronome keeping pace
Speaker 2: with a bell no visitor would ever hear. To challenge
Speaker 2: my own thinking, I decided to observe a single day
Speaker 2: with undivided attention to the second minute. I resolved to
Speaker 2: become both witness and participant, documenting but resisting only when necessary.
Speaker 2: The first test was the primary school. On most mornings,
Speaker 2: I would watch children file in at eight thirty two,
Speaker 2: teachers waving them through the blue painted door. That morning,
Speaker 2: I arrived early and hovered beneath the bell's thick braid
Speaker 2: of rope. The year one teacher, Miss hall ushered her
Speaker 2: line up two minutes before half past, but waited idling
Speaker 2: with forced patients, her hand loosely gripping a battered clip board,
Speaker 2: until the digital clock flicked at eight thirty two. Only
Speaker 2: then did she gesture the children through. When I asked,
Speaker 2: half jokingly, do you run things to the tick? She smiled,
Speaker 2: there's always a moment you need to let every one
Speaker 2: breathe isn't there? She shrugged off another question. You'd be
Speaker 2: surprised what sorts itself out in a spare minute. I
Speaker 2: toured the square and timed the bakery surge of customers.
Speaker 2: Sure enough, the queue thin at seven fifty eight, would
Speaker 2: balloon at eight zero two to Mars, greeting half the
Speaker 2: village as they circled in with the chiming of the
Speaker 2: bell above his shop. It would repeat at each twelve
Speaker 2: twenty two thirty two, with rhythm better than most concert bands.
Speaker 2: Determined to move beyond simple measurement, I decided to ask
Speaker 2: more meaningful questions. Over lunch, I invited several friends from
Speaker 2: the society, spanning generations to share their most vivid memories.
Speaker 2: Without prompting for times, I simply encouraged them to recount
Speaker 2: when they most strongly felt a moment had changed something.
Speaker 2: The answers were immediate and striking. When Dad came home
Speaker 2: from the war, the train pulled in at two zero two,
Speaker 2: one said. Another remembered meeting her husband at the market
Speaker 2: just after twelve. I'll never forget I was running late.
Speaker 2: A third described the night the floodwaters receded. Some one
Speaker 2: pounded on my door. The rivers safe at last, she said,
Speaker 2: And it was eleven twelve. The numbers were everywhere woven
Speaker 2: into their recollection, like the colored threads in missus Chow's quilt.
Speaker 2: Perhaps people remembered most sharply when patterns repeated. Or perhaps
Speaker 2: our psychology, bent for so long to the clock's deliberate pausing,
Speaker 2: had trained itself to hang memory on one particular peg.
Speaker 2: Was it cause or consequence? By now I struggled to
Speaker 2: separate them For further clarity, I tried an experiment of
Speaker 2: my own. I stationed myself in the square, note book
Speaker 2: open pencil ready, and stood with deliberate stillness. As the
Speaker 2: great clock neared nine twelve. I agreed not to document,
Speaker 2: but to feel. As the minute hand crept across the
Speaker 2: blue twelve, I closed my eyes. The moments stretched, The
Speaker 2: air grew suddenly brighter, as if the square itself quietly inhaled.
Speaker 2: My body sharpened to its own anticipation, a sense half
Speaker 2: imagined and half real of alertness, a readiness to act
Speaker 2: or change. Was it expectation playing tricks, a self fulfilling prophecy?
Speaker 2: Had I created the sensation by trying to measure it,
Speaker 2: or was something genuinely unique happening. Every scientific part of
Speaker 2: my mind insisted on suggestion and habit. But another part,
Speaker 2: that old magpie part of the brain that loves strangeness,
Speaker 2: felt there was more at play. Momentum gravity, gravity of
Speaker 2: a different kind. I sought outside help, still wary of
Speaker 2: turning the phenomenon wholly inward. Through the society network, I
Speaker 2: found a visiting horologist, Professor Sinclair, on tour for the
Speaker 2: regional Antique clock Fare. He arrived on a chilly morning,
Speaker 2: practical shoes and an even more practical attitude. I walked
Speaker 2: him to the clock tower, recounted for him Grundle's legend,
Speaker 2: and showed him where I'd seen the pause. He examined
Speaker 2: the mechanism with the quiet efficiency of a surgeon, tapping
Speaker 2: and peering into the core with tiny screwdrivers. No obvious defect.
Speaker 2: He pronounced some play in the gear train, but you'd
Speaker 2: expect that after a century pendulums a bit heavy. May
Speaker 2: be some sticking in the escapement, but it would be
Speaker 2: less regular, if at all. As we stood on the
Speaker 2: grassy circle, he humored me long enough to watch the
Speaker 2: great hand pause. Ever so slightly at twelve twelve. It's
Speaker 2: probably your imagination, or perhaps the natural oscillation of an
Speaker 2: old clock. Maybe your rhythms have grown to fit it,
Speaker 2: he said. Clock watching breeds all sorts of odd fancies.
Speaker 2: You know. His tone was not unkind, just incurious. Unwilling
Speaker 2: to surrender to ambiguity. I recruited mister Leventhal to help
Speaker 2: me compare the town's clocks to atomic time. We set
Speaker 2: a phone with the online clock beneath the pharmacies outside display.
Speaker 2: When the second minute came, the two wavered ever so
Speaker 2: briefly out of alignment, then reconverged within a second. Not
Speaker 2: perfect evidence lag refresh rate the nerves in my own eyes,
Speaker 2: but enough to make us both quietly suspicious. Our tests
Speaker 2: confirmed what I begun to feel. The anomaly lived both
Speaker 2: in the world and in the mind, but escaped capture
Speaker 2: by method alone. It was perhaps uniquely one of those
Speaker 2: situations where proof receded the closer you tried to seize it.
Speaker 2: The phenomenon was potent if you lived here, barely perceptible
Speaker 2: if you analyzed it, and wholly invisible to those looking
Speaker 2: for only the ordinary. Still a question gnawed at me.
Speaker 2: Had other places developed rituals to match this one. Was
Speaker 2: ours truly unique or simply a local version of an
Speaker 2: ancient game? And more daring? Yet, was it possible that,
Speaker 2: over time, our bodies, our very sense of the lived present,
Speaker 2: could be recalibrated by generations of minutes carefully given extra
Speaker 2: weight by a clockmaker's pen. My answer came not from
Speaker 2: the clock nor the archives, but from a visitor whose
Speaker 2: curiosity outmatched even mine. Doctor Samira Yarrow arrived on a Friday,
Speaker 2: drawn by a mutual friend at the County Record Office,
Speaker 2: who had heard with tolerable amusement of a local time
Speaker 2: oddity worthy of a folklorist's notebook. Doctor Yarrow was younger
Speaker 2: than me by half a generation, but she carried herself
Speaker 2: with the wary friendliness of someone who'd spent too long
Speaker 2: in other people's archives and too little among townsfolk. Her
Speaker 2: voice was both brisk and warm, and she agreed over
Speaker 2: a pot of tea at the Society to hear out
Speaker 2: the local case. We sat at the same battered table
Speaker 2: where I'd begun this adventure. She listened to my account,
Speaker 2: grounding me often with questions, who else has noticed? What
Speaker 2: do people say when pressed are you sure you're not
Speaker 2: prompting them. She asked for details from Grundle's letter, nodding
Speaker 2: appreciatively when I handed her a copy. When I finished,
Speaker 2: she tapped her cigarette and lit on the table's edge.
Speaker 2: Communities form their own ritual times, she said, as matter
Speaker 2: of factly, as if discussing rock strata across cultures. People
Speaker 2: structure experience around marks on the clock that gained meaning
Speaker 2: only from repetition, weddings at auspicious hours, agricultural festivals pegged
Speaker 2: to particular dawns, even favorite bus arrivals, she smiled. But
Speaker 2: your second minute is precise in a way that's rare.
Speaker 2: Most traditions are soft, impressionistic. Yours is engineered physical. It
Speaker 2: demands observance because the device insists upon it. I confessed
Speaker 2: my own confusion, but it seems to have reinforced itself.
Speaker 2: Whatever started as a clockmaker's trick or a gift has
Speaker 2: become our script. People feel pulled toward these minutes, but
Speaker 2: never think to ask why. She told me about her
Speaker 2: research in similar villages where Eve of the Solstice rituals
Speaker 2: blended into the fabric of the year, or churches that
Speaker 2: rang bells ten minutes out of phase with their neighbors,
Speaker 2: never noticing the drift. Perception of time, she explained, is
Speaker 2: uniquely vulnerable to ritual. If the community expects certain events
Speaker 2: at certain points, our bodies leaned toward them. We're entrained,
Speaker 2: like synchronized dancers. She leaned forward, growing more animated. But
Speaker 2: here the mechanism began it and the tradition did the rest.
Speaker 2: It's not just the clocks now, it's the memory, the conversation,
Speaker 2: the pattern of behavior. The mechanism imposed the pause, but
Speaker 2: the village created the meaning. She compared it half with
Speaker 2: a laugh, to the placebo effect on a civic scale,
Speaker 2: a self re enforcing loop. The clock gives you the
Speaker 2: pause you expected. The next generation learns the expectation and
Speaker 2: forgets the reason. Memory crystallizes around the minute. Decisions settle
Speaker 2: in the well of that extra second. Soon, there's no
Speaker 2: difference between what's real and what's acted out. Both are
Speaker 2: true in their own way. I challenged her with the
Speaker 2: skepticism I had left. But it's only us outsiders, my niece,
Speaker 2: even you perhaps don't see or feel it. Is it
Speaker 2: merely a story? She considered, Perhaps, but stories don't exist
Speaker 2: outside time. They re arrange it. There's research into cultural synchrony,
Speaker 2: like the trance rhythms in Balkan choirs or the communal
Speaker 2: timing in West African harvesting groups over decades come to
Speaker 2: feel and act in phase. Your second minute is I think,
Speaker 2: a kind of folk technology, a feedback between engineered pause
Speaker 2: and living culture. My theory, the pause in the clock
Speaker 2: encouraged people to act together. The community, in turn gave
Speaker 2: the pause broader significance over a century. It became how
Speaker 2: people remembered, how they waited, how they chose to decide.
Speaker 2: Time itself is not changed, but its experience in this
Speaker 2: square at this hour absolutely is. I remembered the sensation
Speaker 2: in the square, the prickling anticipation, the involuntary readiness to act.
Speaker 2: As the two came. I thought of how my friends
Speaker 2: memories clustered around those odd numbered minutes, how meetings naturally
Speaker 2: gravitated toward them, as if everyone waiting for an invisible
Speaker 2: conductor's signal. She had another observation, ritual is technology. You
Speaker 2: inherit even if you don't believe in it. You still
Speaker 2: go through the motions, and the motions shape everything else,
Speaker 2: especially in communities with strong continuity where families stay, where
Speaker 2: routines root deeply. These engineered artifacts can change not just behavior,
Speaker 2: but how the past is stored in mind. I decided
Speaker 2: to ask around with her. In tow we found missus Chow,
Speaker 2: who repeated her adage about blessing the minute. Missus Chow
Speaker 2: confided with a laugh that she thought her most decisive
Speaker 2: days began on a twelve or two, but admitted she
Speaker 2: never scheduled them on purpose. It's luck, or maybe the
Speaker 2: minute finds you. Doctor Yarrow probed further among younger people
Speaker 2: to Mars for one, he shrugged, skeptical. To me, it's nonsense,
Speaker 2: he said, though when reminded that he'd never once opened
Speaker 2: at a round hour, he blinked, uncertain. That's just how
Speaker 2: it's done always as another teen in the bakery agreed
Speaker 2: its tradition mostly for the oldies, but when asked what
Speaker 2: time she'd meet her friend, she replied, without hesitation, seven
Speaker 2: twelve's better. I'll be up by then that evening. As
Speaker 2: dusk settled over the square and the society prepared to close,
Speaker 2: Doctor Yarrow summarized her findings. The second minute isn't magic
Speaker 2: and is quite superstition. It's the place where invention becomes habit,
Speaker 2: and habit becomes necessity. She smiled, her gentle, slightly amused smile.
Speaker 2: In a sense, Grundle's clock shaped the logic of the
Speaker 2: whole village. Even now that you've seen behind the curtain,
Speaker 2: you can't quite step out of its pool. I followed
Speaker 2: her observations down their own winding paths. In the days after.
Speaker 2: I wondered if my attention to the paws made it
Speaker 2: more potent, or whether the ritual strength lay in its
Speaker 2: being unnoticed until someone, as I accidentally had done, peered
Speaker 2: directly at it. Yet something fundamental had shifted. I longer
Speaker 2: watched clocks, searching only for stuttering hands. I began to
Speaker 2: see all the little human adjacencies that rose up in
Speaker 2: the pores. The school children's laughter at eight thirty two,
Speaker 2: the brief hush in the bakery at nine to twelve,
Speaker 2: The way even impatient bus drivers waited half a heartbeat
Speaker 2: longer before shutting the door. Just shy of ten twenty two,
Speaker 2: thinking about doctor Yarrow's idea of folk technology, I realized
Speaker 2: Lower Warrens second minute was more than a quirk preserved
Speaker 2: by happenstance. It was a social agreement, passed down and reinforced,
Speaker 2: second by second, generation by generation, a rhythm no less
Speaker 2: real for being half folklore half mechanism. I found myself
Speaker 2: dwelling on how many customs started this way. A single act,
Speaker 2: designed or accidental, pressed so deeply into routine that it
Speaker 2: eventually rewrites the expectations of everyone around it. In Lower Warren,
Speaker 2: we received an extra second, and from that shaped an
Speaker 2: entire language of toget batheredness, decisions, small acts of courage,
Speaker 2: market mornings, moments of memory, all accumulating just off the
Speaker 2: hour in intervals. No outsider cared to count one afternoon.
Speaker 2: Sitting quietly with my own thoughts in the square, I
Speaker 2: realized my curiosity had come to rest not on proof
Speaker 2: or precise measurement, but on the perimeter between invention and acceptance,
Speaker 2: on the space where possibility gathers before it becomes the
Speaker 2: status quo. I did not know if I would have
Speaker 2: ever seen the second minute, if I hadn't left teaching,
Speaker 2: or if I hadn't had time to feel the gentle
Speaker 2: relentlessness of small town repetition. My sense of the ordinary
Speaker 2: had been remade. I imagined how many such customs built
Speaker 2: for reasons long forgotten still choreograph the lives of communities
Speaker 2: who would laugh at the suggestion they are unusual at all.
Speaker 2: It was enough for me to know that most mysteries,
Speaker 2: once you spend long enough with them, resist both total
Speaker 2: confirmation and total dismissal. There is comfort, I think, in
Speaker 2: honoring that resistance, in letting the story have its own life,
Speaker 2: even as the explanation slides away when you try to
Speaker 2: pin it down. Doctor Yarrow moved on to other projects.
Speaker 2: Mister Leventhal joke that my grand clock theory might become
Speaker 2: a footnote in some future pamphlet about eccentric English villages.
Speaker 2: Missus Wainscott seemed gently pleased there was a reason, if
Speaker 2: not an explanation, for her preference for odd times, but
Speaker 2: said it changed nothing really to Mars kept opening at two,
Speaker 2: the bus drivers kept timing their departures with half a glance,
Speaker 2: and I stopped trying to schedule anything on the hour,
Speaker 2: knowing full well I hadn't succeeded when I'd tried. Sitting
Speaker 2: under the emerald shadow of the Society's front window on
Speaker 2: one fading evening, I felt no urgency to force the
Speaker 2: town to recognize its pattern, nor any wish to disrupt it. Instead,
Speaker 2: I put away my notes and watch and simply let
Speaker 2: the old clock tower do as it had for generations,
Speaker 2: exactly what it was built to do. The Next week,
Speaker 2: at the annual celebration of the clock, I joined the
Speaker 2: crowd in the square. The children waited restlessly, one boy
Speaker 2: swinging his cardboard clock by its ribbon, the mare in
Speaker 2: his ancient top hat, grinning at the gathered audience. When
Speaker 2: the orchestra leader tapped his stand and gave the children
Speaker 2: a nod, the great clock struck six forty two. The
Speaker 2: pause came a beat, a stretch of possibility, an extra
Speaker 2: heartbeat of attention. The music began, the bells rang, and
Speaker 2: for that instant I could see both the artifice and
Speaker 2: the affection, whether or not time moved differently. Here I
Speaker 2: knew that my own sense of the world had subtly shifted.
Speaker 2: Each second minute now wholly present to me, not as
Speaker 2: a secret, but as a small, necessary miracle, a moment
Speaker 2: taken every time to gather oneself before life resumes. From
Speaker 2: my seat, I watch the faces of the children, eager, earnest,
Speaker 2: half aware. It was clear that half the village celebrated
Speaker 2: the clock's peculiar rhythm with full knowledge, and the other
Speaker 2: half cherished it, never knowing it was there. I found
Speaker 2: myself glad for both. As the crowd thinned and the
Speaker 2: square emptied, I lingered for a while, listening to the
Speaker 2: faint echo of the clock's chime. The hands, gilded and
Speaker 2: heavy with memory, swept onward. They're in the gentle space
Speaker 2: between forty one and forty three. The world hesitated for
Speaker 2: an unhurried second, and I wondered, not for the first time,
Speaker 2: how many communities across the world have their own unseen seconds,
Speaker 2: their own unnoticed pauses that quietly structure everything, waiting only
Speaker 2: for someone to look closely enough to see the miracle
Speaker 2: nestled in the mundane. The next day, as I watched
Speaker 2: the clock's hand linger again, I resolved to keep searching
Speaker 2: for such moments, quiet aberrations, small extra measures, unnoticed in
Speaker 2: ventions that with enough time, become as real as the
Speaker 2: ticking of a great clock at rest in its own
Speaker 2: lovingly engineered delay.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.