Time Rusts On

Somewhere deep in rural France, this clock looks down upon the decaying, crumbling platform of a country station. It stopped at 11.40. Was that morning or evening?

Did anyone notice when it uttered its terminal tick, marked its final passage of a moment of time? Had the last train departed, the platform swept bare of the gossiping locals off to market, the chickens cooped up in their crates, the silvery churns brimming with rich, full-fat milk?

Nature is at work now, claiming back its own. The clock faces west, towards the setting sun. It has seen many flaming skys, its mechanism warmed by the dying embers of a summer's day. And many cloud-enshrouded horizons, storms sweeping in from the Atlantic, winds lashing its forlorn countenance, drenching, freezing, rotting.

Forty years ago, give or take, it stopped. Since then it has slumbered, screwed resolutely to the cement-rendered wall. A wasting disease is creeping across the dial; its numerals have been shed - were they Romanesque or something more prosaic? Eventually holes will appear, a latticework pattern of rust eating away at its underlying structure, bit by bit, until the clock crumbles away to red dust.

Then all that will remain will be a circular, streaky stain and, perhaps, that pair of grey pointers, fashioned from sterner, more resistant material, markers of a past function, the hands of time.