February 2015

Playing with Time

When I was a child, I was fascinated by cuckoo clocks. One of my aunts had one, and whenever we visited, I would sit there, waiting for the hour to strike so that the little bird would pop out and do its chirping.

There are less purely cheerful animated clocks, of course. Not long ago, Sotheby’s had an erotic 18th century clock. It looked quite innocent—the naughty bits were hidden behind a painting of a duck. (Don’t get your hopes up. It was more ludicrously comic than erotic.)