Marylebone, a district so often accused of being “too elegant for its own good,” has now added another feather to its Best Place to Live in London cap: the recently established Marylebone Society for the Philosophical Contemplation of Timepieces (MSPCT). Their aim is deceptively simple: to sit in front of clocks, preferably ornate ones, and reflect deeply on what it all means.
The group meets twice weekly in a Chiltern Street café, where they have commandeered a corner table beneath a faintly inaccurate grandfather clock. According to their founder, Professor Lucinda Greaves (formerly of Comparative Literature at Birkbeck), the society is not about punctuality but about ontology. “The clock does not tell the time,” she remarked with the solemnity of someone about to order a cream tea, “the clock tells us about the impossibility of ever possessing time. It is, in fact, a kind of performance art, with each tick as radical as Duchamp’s urinal.”
Her deputy, Norman Peake, offered a more earthy interpretation: “When the hand moves from the three to the four, it is bacon sandwich time. Then, it is digestion time. Then, it is perhaps gin time. Life is merely a series of clock-induced appetites.”
The society’s minutes are filled with references to Heidegger, to Derrida’s différance, and, curiously, to a footnote in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice in which he laments a clock tower’s chipped gargoyle. They claim this proves that horology is not merely technical, but an aesthetic confrontation with mortality. One member compared the experience of watching the second hand stutter forward to “listening to the late works of Beethoven, if Beethoven had been sponsored by Swatch.”
Not all locals are enchanted. A café regular, Ms Theodora Bunsley, complained: “They sit there, motionless, ordering one pot of Earl Grey and a doughnut between twelve of them. It’s sinister.”
Nevertheless, momentum is building. Next month, the group embarks on its first official pilgrimage: to Marylebone Station, where they will spend twelve uninterrupted hours gazing at the departures board, making notes in Moleskines, and occasionally sighing in unison. An international conference is also coming soon, with papers to be presented including such topics as “The Ontology of the Cuckoo Clock” and “Big Ben as Britain’s True National Anthem.”
One hesitates to mock, for in their silence there is an oddly compelling seriousness. As I left the café, I glanced at my wristwatch and felt, for the first time, a faint flicker of shame that it was digital.
