Perhaps WH Auden is to blame. Stop all the clocks! he commands in the poem made famous in Four Weddings and a Funeral and, walking through most big towns, there's a sense that this order has been too closely obeyed. Big Ben bongs on, but many others are stopped for good. From Newcastle upon Tyne to Salisbury and many points between, these symbols of a more communal age lie idling, or altogether idle. Their mechanisms are hard to get at and the cost of correction prohibitive, so they simply go on disconsolately telling the world it is, say, 10:15 when, except at two points in the day, it isn't. Even worse are the clocks whose hands still revolve, but misleadingly. They tell a plausible story, but are either mildly slow or modestly fast. Where they're fast they cause unnecessary alarm; where they are slow, they create a false sense of security, causing trains to be missed. What's to be done? Nestlé keeps the Rowntree factory clock running for less with solar panels. One blogspot, Stoppedclocks, is trying the naming and shaming route. But maybe it's time for a public clock tsar, with power to demand that owners restore their timepieces to reliable service. Perhaps some of these misinformers would be removed, but others would be repaired. And those which are part of a building's fabric and cannot now be extirpated? Here there is only once answer. The tsar would issue the order: off with their hands! (The hands of the clock, that is, not their errant proprietor's; this is the Guardian.)
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