It’s no fun when your body’s in one place and your heart in another.
By body I mean my handsome seven-foot frame in polished oak, standing alone and empty-faced in a corner of the house I now call home.
By heart I mean what makes me tick. My ticker, indubitably the mot juste for this sad story: the clockwork mechanism that keeps me going. My very raison d’être.
Yet now I’m cut in two. My heart awaits surgery ten miles from my body. Surgery delayed because the elderly clock-maker is recovering (at least I hope he is) from an operation on his right hand.
My own hands — and I have three! — lie in a cardboard box alongside my heart, attached to the painted face that boasts my birthplace and creator’s name.
Until now I’ve survived, intact, several owners since master horologist Thos. Wilson in Preston, Lancashire created me 238 years ago.
The first person to wind and care for me was a gentleman farmer called Archibald Eves. After he was bankrupted by foot-and-mouth disease. I was sold to a bank manager in Leek, Staffordshire. Colin Worsley was proud to insert his key every Saturday to wind my time and chime. His wife Gladys polished my body, dusted my ball, wiped my finial.
From Colin and Gladys I passed through four generations of the same family, until my current custodian fell in love with me aged seven when his grandparents moved south.
Edward has adored me ever since, and it is he who separated my heart from my body after my ticker failed.
I know he did that only because he loves me. I must just be patient until my heart is mended and restored to my body.
Then we shall be reunited, and time will start again.
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