What’s a watch?

We wore them on our wrists to tell the time.

Really? Tell the time what?

No, you eejit! Tell the time, like telling you the time.

So, this little fellah on your wrist had a voice? Like having a parrot on your shoulder, except not on your shoulder and I suppose it didn’t have feathers either?

No! It did not. And when I say ‘Tell’, I mean like the bells ringing in a church.

Oh come on! That can’t be right, at all! To my ears now, telling is a lot different to ringing, though I did have a teacher of mathematics with a completely bald head and who was mad as a maggot.

Mr Coates?

That’s him. He told great stories but he was the one who gave me a right telling off one time and then slapped my head. Or maybe it was the other way round, I can’t remember. But I do remember I had a sort of ringing in my ears then. So you could say there is a case of having ringing and telling sort of yoked together.

I don’t think I’d say that at all. Why did he give you the slap?

I was not so good at the times tables that I had been trying to recite. But  you wouldn’t know about times tables and all that because now the only fellahs who know how to count play darts, and that’s not much help to anyone because they do their counting backwards; and what’s more the people who play darts are so big they can’t ever move from the dartboard. They are like stuck to the floor.

Is that because they are, generally speaking, too heavy.

They are, generally speaking, too heavy.

Maybe then what I am saying is that it is not so much that church bells ‘tell’ as ‘toll.’ You know, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

That is a very different kettle of fish.

It is a different kettle of fish because, as you know, church bells toll when there is a death.

Like I toll you so?

Exactly.

So your watch, that you wear now on your wrist is, in effect, telling you you’ve just about clocked off, almost stopped the old ticker ticking , or worst of all gasped out your last order for a pint.

In a way.

That’s grim thing to carry around, if you ask me.

Well, in a way it isn’t that at all.

Jasus! How can something so small be so confusing!

That’s time for you.

Like the landlord calling out the last orders.

In a way.

Will you have another pint then, then?

Of course.