I may have mentioned before that try not to be possessive and would happily give almost anything to someone else who really needed it. There are only a few things that are meaningful in the house, and they are things with memories of different people in the family. I would love them to go on to the next generation, but I have a feeling they wouldn´t want them - mahogany is not a popular wood, despite being one of the most beautiful, and mechanical clocks are an anachronism (literally). One thing I do cherish is an old Victorian mantle clock which belonged to "Gramps", my mother´s mother. I think she bought it at a big house sale in Derbyshire, but am not sure. Anyway, it was one of the few treasured possessions she had in her house and I "inherited" it when she moved into an old people´s bungalow.
It is black slate and beige marble, with a french movement with a "brocot" external escapement. For over 40 years, it has been sitting in our lounge, wherever we were, and when we were "overseas" had a specially made transportation box as it is heavy. It was cleaned in the mid-seventies by a clock-engineer in Burnage, a nice old guy called Mr. Cawse - who, like all clock repairers, left his name inside to show he had cleaned it. It wasn´t running at one point when I lived in Bramhall and I vividly remember my mother leaning over and straightening the dial fractionally, saying that it was always temperamental about being absolutely level - as it started purring.
Anyway, said clock threw a bit of a hissy in the early part of the year and stopped. It was partially my fault, as noticing the chimes were out of sequence, I ran the hands around to see if it would sort it self out (which sometimes works). This time it didn´t and the whole thing "locked solid". Knowing that it was a point when further meddling could damage it, I took it into the local jeweller and watch-repairer in Fuengirola and asked him to clean it and sort it out. That was a week or so before lockdown. I naively thought he had a perfect job for lockdown, whereby he could sit in his workshop working on all his clocks (and especially mine), but when I went down to check in July, it turned out that he had just shut his premises and walked away for 3 months. He said he would get on with it, but for some reason, and despite my having been a very good (and well paying) customer for twenty years, I had my doubts.
This week I told G I would go in and check, and if the clock still hadn´t been touched, I would bring it home anyway. My logic being that I would rather have it stopped in my house than stopped on a shelf in his workshop. Yesterday a went in and the clock was still in exactly the same place. I asked what was happening, and he told me he had ordered a part months ago, but with the crisis, it had never arrived. When I asked what it was, he told me "the suspension", which is a part holding the pendulum, so I knew he was bu*****ting me. I just told him to let me know if it ever arrived, then took the clock away on G´s garden trolley.
Yesterday I looked at a couple of Youtube videos on french clock mechanisms and decided I could possibly sort it myself as long as nothing was broken - and even then there is an army of parts suppliers on ebay. So today, I put it on the bench and took out the movement. Gently I touched a couple of ratchets relating to the striking mechanism and suddenly it started ticking.
At that point I realised he hadn´t given me back my pendulum.
I jury-rigged a pendulum from another victorian clock (which had been living in a cupboard for 40 years) and which fitted well enough to allow it to swing and tick and show it wasn´t jammed any more.
I zoomed down to Fuengirola and, despite being very busy down there, got a parking space right outside the market doors. (Thanks, Oscar). When I went and asked for the pendulum, he said it was probably inside the clock, and asked if I had looked. "Yes", maybe a bit tersely. He reached on the shelf and pulled out two scruffy, and totally out-of-place, pendulums (penduli?) which were better suited to a skip. "No, mine had my name on it" I told him. He begrudgingly got a stool and got up and checked the shelf - eventually bringing down the correct pendulum in an envelope with my details.
Thanking him, but lacking in any real sincerity, and not mentioing that I now had it running, I returned home - actually rather gleefully.
At this moment, the clock is sitting on my bench and running. I will let it get a bit more "unwound", then actually check the chimes. I think I know how that bit of the mechanism works now, so may try to sort it if there are still problems - but on the other hand, it might as well be back in the lounge and not chiming - as with my hearing I can´t actually hear the chimes from my chair anyway!
PS now the 24th and the clock is back in the lounge, running and chiming perfectly. I found a couple of sites where they showed how to reset clocks which were "out of sync" with times and chimes, including how to reset and move the hands - and luckily had the "other" old french clock to test the techniques. It all worked - to the extent G decided the "other" clock was nice enough to have in the dining room. Unfortunately it was a bit tatty-looking, with a slight "bloom" on parts of the slate. Received wisdom is to use washing-up liquid and warm water, but this did not do much other than get rid of old grime. In a moment of inspiration, I thought of WD40 (about which there are legendary claims for almost everything you can think of online). Cleaning slate was not one of the claims, but now it should be.
Ta-da!
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