The Indoor Sundial

It is a real sundial, and that is the maddening part. Cast brass, engraved hour lines, a gnomon angled for your latitude, four felt pads so it does not scratch the sideboard. It is calibrated to within a couple of minutes. 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.

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.

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.