 At eight years old my father went away for a year to a clock-making conservation restoration college in the south of England. David Rooney is a writer and museum curator. Well close to my birthday, my father came back home one of the rare visits and he brought a present. Something he'd rescued from a dumpster and it was a clock. Just a really cheap, probably 1940s battery operated mantle clock. Somebody had it broken, the glass had broken, the mechanism had stopped working, they'd thrown it out. He rescued it. He worked hard on it in the evenings. He changed the glass, he polished it up, he repaired the mechanism and he brought it and gave it to me. He'd brought it back to life. People didn't have their own clock as a kid when I was growing up. And there it was. And it made me think actually that clocks do have lives. I wonder why we care so much about clocks the way we do. Why do we give a clock or a watch as a retirement gift? Why do we pass on our clocks and watches to our families? Well they've got us in them. They've got life in them. My father breathed life into that one. So most of the time I would be away at school or be in my room doing my homework. But you know at weekends I played a role, a tiny role in the business. Now we know that most mechanical clocks tick, right? There's a tick and there's a tock. But that ticking and talking has to be even. It turned out that I had a really good ear. That the evenness of the tick was the same as the tock. And if it wasn't, the clock needed to be adjusted and that was my job. That was a job my father gave me was right. I've said it as well as I think. Now you go and listen to it. It's the beat even and I would listen to it, listen to it. It's tick tock, tick tock. I make an adjustment. Tick tock, tick tock. That's it, you've got it. What that meant was that I was getting really close to these remarkable devices. My ear right up to them and that stayed with me I guess.