Is That A Wind Up?

There is a post doing the rounds on social media that asks people to name something from their childhood that younger people would not understand, and I thought of that post while wandering round the house on Sunday morning, looking for clocks to put back from British Summer Time to GMT. It isn't so much the changing of the clocks, but the fact that these days many of them do it themselves that is different today,  so it is just the devices not connected to the internet, like the central heating and the microwave and an actual stand-alone clock on the mantelpiece that need manual attention. Even the thing on my wrist that tells me the time - it's a Fitbit, rather than just a watch - updates the time automatically.

What really struck me was that everything that has a clock in it in our house runs off the mains or batteries; younger people will rarely - if ever - have encountered, the clock or watch that needs winding up. I have worn a watch of one kind or another since I was quite young, but it seems that these days the younger generation are more likely to rely on their phones for telling the time, albeit that wearable technology like the Apple Watch and Fitbits may reverse that trend.

I remember my first watch - a wind-up job, of course - as it was a Christmas present. Sadly, it didn't last very long as my Dad managed to drop it and break it (well, that's what he told me), but it got replaced with a new Timex, which was then really the brand to have. I had that watch for some years, although now sadly I cannot remember what it was like. At some point during the 1970's the digital watch appeared, with Sinclair (of ZX-Spectrum computer fame) producing one that had to be assembled at home, by "anybody who can use a soldering iron," another thing that is very much a thing of the past, except for devoted hobbyists. Unable to tell one end of a soldering iron from the other, I refrained from buying such a watch, virtues of which were its proclaimed accuracy and not needing to be wound up.

Accuracy: that is probably the feature that I for one value most in a watch, and one which led me to bin the self-winding one I bought. Freed from the need to wind the thing up every day, the self-winding watch required just a couple of minutes of swishing about in a figure-of-eight pattern to get it started, whereafter the natural movement of one's wrist would keep it going. That element was fine, but the fact that it kept such poor time - usually gaining a minute or two every day - meant that I went back to my old wind up model. One would think that these days clocks and watches would keep nearly perfect time, and in fact of all the devices in our house that display the time, there is little more than a minute's discrepancy between any of them, except the one on the microwave which, left to its own devices, will be fifteen minutes ahead of every other clock in the house within a month of being reset. Why I wonder, does that happen?

Aside from winding up clocks and watches, I imagine that there are many of the younger generation who would find cassette tapes a bit of a mystery, and especially the associated repair kit. Those of you of a certain age will, I'm sure, remember - and none too fondly - listening to a music cassette, only for the song to suddenly distort and the tape abruptly stop. Having pressed the Stop button, one gingerly ejects the tape. 

The best case scenario is then that the tape has merely tangled slightly in the recording heads and that after extricating it, increasing the tension on the tape with a pencil through the sprocket hole would do the trick, although that section of the tape would now, forever more, sound slightly garbled. The worst case however would be a broken tape - or a tape so badly mangled that it had to be broken - and requiring splicing. Out would come the splicing kit, the tape would be repaired and playable, but at the cost of a second or two of song, such that when playing it back in future there would be a sudden jump, rather like with a scratched vinyl record. I was going to say that vinyl records are something that current and future generations might scratch their heads over, but vinyl seems to be making something of a comeback, although the prices are a bit eye-watering, if you ask me.

If you are under  50, you probably have no idea what this is.

 

One thing that the younger generation is only too aware of, however, and which they usually greet with eye-rolling dismay, is when someone - usually a parent - starts up a monologue that begins with, "Back in my day." Admit it, we've all done it, and such diatribes risk entering Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen territory, frequently referring back to the days when TV came in two channels (in black and white), there was nothing on the box during weekday afternoons except the test card, and Sunday afternoon viewing was a choice between a couple of ropey old films (usually some Second World War picture, or a Western), followed by Songs of Praise. Plaintive cries of "I'm bored" were the soundtrack to such afternoons: any teenager claiming to be bored nowadays will risk hearing such stories repeated.

Floppy discs, video cameras, fax machines, rolls of camera film, having to stay in to watch a particular TV show because VCRs hadn't been invented, the Christmas blockbuster TV premiere of a film that had been in cinemas five years ago, dial-up internet, or the Encarta CD-ROM because you didn't have the internet yet, or if you did someone wanted to use the landline to make a telephone call at the same time...the list could go on. The pace of change -particularly in technology - is such that what to me are recent developments, like MySpace, Friends Reunited, and MSN Messenger are now just memories. It is impossible to conceive what future generations will make of the things today's youngsters wistfully recall. Like watches without batteries, they will probably think it's a wind-up.