Some Other Tuesday

Published on Friday, 18 April 2014, 11:54am

It is ten past two. In this country, England, within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, this is how we tell the time. To tell: to speak, to say, to impart. But the verb also means ‘to know’. This is how we know the time, more how we understand it.

In a photograph, the gold hands of the blue clock face on St Georges’ Church stand together, for this brief moment, catching the early Spring sunshine. The next time in this diurnal round that they meet together on the Roman II, they will perhaps glint in the light of a street lamp.

We tell the same time twice a day, at ante and post meridian. As we contemplate this image of the spire rising into the deep blue sky, we know the time. The clock tells us that on some other Tuesday in the past we were standing at the gates of Church grounds, necks craned upwards, at ten past two, the moment marked by the click of the shutter.

Not 14.10 as our continental European cousins would have it, but ten minutes past the hour of two of the clock.

On that Tuesday, we were not concerned with catching trains, or logging the time of an email or attending an official appointment or any of the other things regulated by the digital moment, but standing still, catching the very moment that ten past two became eleven minutes past the hour of two of the clock.