23 Sep 09 The Ticking Clock

A couple of mornings ago, I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, eating breakfast.

The extractor above the stove top was still running, and I got up to switch it off.

“Is that annoying you?” said my wife.
“A little”, I said adding that we seem to live in a world of constant noise these days.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like conversation, I like music, and I wouldn’t want to live in a world of silence.

However, I recalled when I was a small child, and we used to visit my great-grandmother, and also a great aunt. In the pauses between conversation all you could hear was the ticking of the clock. A ‘real’ clock too. This was long before the age of digital anything!

Now as we sat there in the kitchen I could hear, that extractor, the refrigerator, the air conditioning and the washing machine. Outside someone was running some power tools. Many times on top of this cacaphony is the babble from a television that no-one is watching.

The only thing I couldn’t hear was the relaxing rythmic ticking of a clock.

Tags: clock, noise, thoughts, time