IN ALL THE 31 years, 8 months, 22 days, 13 hours and 27 minutes that I had been writing regularly for this newspaper, I had never been as gobsmacked by anything in it as I was at 8.12 on Monday morning, the minute up to which all those other minutes had led. In the interests of precision, I wish I could tell you how many seconds there were on the end of the minutes, but I can’t. That is because, when the minutes began, back in 1974, I did not have an Artex clock. None of us had. We did not know about the Artex clock until Monday morning, at 8.12 in my case, slightly earlier or later in yours, depending on when you opened The Times.
To page 8 of times2. Where, beneath two unforgivably sloppy recipes for, on the left, duck salad with tarragon from Thomasina Miers, and, on the right, roast chestnuts from Joanna Weinberg, there was an advertisement from Times Offers Direct that put both these women to professional shame. How Ms Miers will ever hold up her head again after telling her readers to marinate the duck for “a minimum of one hour, but preferably three to four”, or Ms Weinberg go out in public after telling hers, even more slaphappily, to roast the chestnuts until “one of them pops with a loud bang”, I cannot imagine. The sooner each coughs up £19.95 for an Artex clock to bolt beside her hob, the likelier both are to stave off their leaving parties.
For the Artex clock, according to the rubric that so unprecedentedly gobsmacked me, is “guaranteed to be accurate to less than a second in a million years”. That is one hell of a guarantee. I know it to be an honest one, too, because it carries The Times imprimatur, which means that the most nit-picking lawyers in the world — they have a collection of my own nits, which is second to none — have nodded it through. They are confident that if, in AD1,000,2005 an owner of an Artex clock bangs on the front door of The Times and demands his money back on the grounds that, after only 999,999 years, his clock is two seconds fast, he will not have a leg to stand on.
If, that is, he has legs at all. He’s a queer cove, your Johnny Evolution, and anything might have happened to homo sapiens by then. Either that, or global ennucleation will have ensured that the only creature left to survive will, by 1,000,2005, have developed into cockroach sapiens, who will have a lot of legs and be able to carry several iffy Artex clocks while still having a couple of legs free to bang on the Times door with. Provided, of course, that it is still The Times and not The Daily Cockroach; in which event the management may well disclaim any obligation to honour the guarantee offered by their predecessor in 2006. Should you wish clarification on this point before ringing 0870 789 0716 to order your clock, I suggest you ring the Times lawyers. If, mind, unable to contain your excitement, you ordered it as soon as you saw Monday’s ad, I really don’t know what to suggest.
Some of you may not care: you may hold the view that since the clock will by 1,000,2005 no longer be yours but the property of a cockroach to whom you have no genetic connection, that is an end of the matter. Others more optimistic, blindly confident that the human race will not, any day now, vaporise itself, may be mortified at the thought that its distant descendant — let us call it grandchild 786 — will discover that, having been handed down successfully through 30,000 generations, its Artex clock is now on the fritz. Worse yet, your descendant may discover this by a life-changing shock: it could turn up for the first day at its first job, dressed in its smart new outfit, clutching its smart new briefcase, only to hear: “What time do you call this? You should have been here two seconds ago,” and find itself out on its ear.
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This could be even more disastrous: if the human race has not vaporised itself, by AD1,000,2005 there will be, according to my slide-rule, over two trillion people on the planet. Jobs will therefore be extraordinarily scarce, and employers extraordinarily choosy (hence the punctuality discriminator), so that anyone luckless enough to lose his on the very first day might well have to jump off Westminster Bridge and drown himself. Or rather, given the effect global warming will have had on the River Thames by then, break his neck.
Did I hear you ask if the Artex is an alarm clock? Not half it isn’t.