The Indoor Sundial

It is a real sundial, and that is the maddening part. Cast brass, engraved hour lines, a pointer angled for your part of the world, and four felt pads so it does not scratch the furniture. It has clearly been made with great care by people who love sundials. It is also completely useless in the one place it was designed to stand, which is a room with a ceiling.

So the box includes a torch. The leaflet, in the same serious typeface as the rest, asks you to position the light source at the appropriate solar angle, which is to say, hold the torch roughly where the sun would be if there were a sun, and the dial will tell you what time it would be if the torch were the sun. Nobody asked for this. The kitchen already has a clock, the clock already has a battery, and the battery has never once needed anyone to hold it at an angle.

The first evening is usually spent on the rug. The owner kneels by the low table near the fire, turning the dial a fraction this way and that, while someone else stands on the sofa with the torch, asking whether this is high enough. The fire casts a second, wobbly shadow that disagrees with the first. After some discussion, the household agrees to ignore the fire, and it becomes, officially, twenty past three in the afternoon, at nine o’clock at night.

And yet there is one use for it that no ordinary clock can match. Because you are holding the sun, you decide where the sun is. A hand’s width to the left and it is the middle of the afternoon. Lower it towards the carpet and the evening comes in early, which settles most household arguments about whether it is too soon for cake. The dial has never once been consulted about bedtime, which the younger members of the household consider the finest feature of the whole design.

The real thing behind the joke is how different it feels to read the time from light rather than from a number. A clock simply announces the hour. A shadow creeps towards it, slowly, and asks you to notice. The indoor sundial turns even that into a small shared task: somebody has to hold the light, somebody has to read the dial, and everybody has an opinion about the angle.

It is the only clock in the house that needs an accomplice, and it takes a certain ceremony to consult: the torch, the angle, the small squabble about who gets to hold it. It is also the only clock in the house that has never yet told anybody they were late.