The Village Clock That Is Four Minutes Fast

The clock on the village hall gained four minutes in the autumn of 1971 and was never corrected. The clockmaker who might have done it retired that winter, and the next one quoted a price, and by then the four minutes had begun to belong to people.

Everybody knows. The bus timetable is written to the real time, and everybody in the village adds the four minutes back without thinking, in the way you adjust for a step that is higher than the others. Visitors are the only ones who miss buses, and the village considers this a fair test.

It has been put to a vote twice. In 1994 the motion to repair it was defeated by a considerable margin. In 2011 somebody proposed it again, with a costing and a diagram, and it was defeated by more. The recorded objection on both occasions was the same: the clock is not wrong, it is early, and there is a great deal of difference between the two.

The children born since have grown up in a place where the time on the wall is not quite the time, and nobody thinks anything of it. One of them, home from university, was heard explaining to a friend that the clock is fine, actually, and that it is the rest of the world that runs four minutes behind.