Understanding the clock face

I was astonished to read that Lorna Sage (a Professor of English at University of East Anglia) claimed in her autobiography 'Bad Blood' that she wasn't able to tell the time until she was 16. Hardly lacking in intellect, she said she couldn't face looking at a clock. I know how she felt. I too wasn't confident telling the time on an analogue clock until I had reached my teenage years. I later attributed it to some kind of dyslexia (I do sometimes reverse the clock face in a moment of bleary eyed exhaustion, reading 4pm as 8pm - it's mirror image).

For a long time I too couldn't bear looking at a clock face but fortunately I was saved for a while by digital watches which were very popular in the 1980s, when I was a teenager. Wearing a digital watch rather than an analogue meant that I could confidently tell the time when someone asked me (something I usually dreaded). It was entirely straight forward; the first lot of numbers before the dividing dots showed the hour and the second lot showed how many minutes had passed since the hour. Better still, you didn't have to understand what they represented - you just had to read out what you saw: 09:15 was 'nine fifteen' and no-one would be any the wiser if you didn't know what it meant. No need to convert 15 into 'quarter past' or 45 into 'quarter to'. I liked my digital watch because, to me, it represented time in the linear sense - as a journey - hour accumulating upon hour, minute upon minute. Seeing time as a number line makes it easier to know where time starts and finishes whereas a circular clock face seems to suggest infinity and makes me feel a queasy and shaky, like I'm drifting in space.

Spot the deliberate mistake above - well I did say I have trouble with the concept of time!

But my biggest obstacle to understanding a clock face was that it was supposed to do two things; the numbers 1-12 represented the hours (1am, 2am, 3am etc) but they also increments of five minutes; so depending on which hand was pointing to a number (the short or long? I would  often muddle them up) 1 could represent 1am or 1pm, or it could mean 'five past'. How could numbers represent two things at the same time? It wasn't right, I hated that it wasn't right and I switched my brain off entirely.

I realise that it was only when I learnt to see the clock face solely as representing 60 minutes, and each number as representing increments, or fractions of that 60 minutes, that I felt comfortable telling the time. All I had to worry about was where the small hand was pointing to make sense of those 60 minutes and what part of the 'number line' they fell on. This led me to thinking about how I could design a clock face to represent minutes and hours in a way that was more pleasing to me. I will write about this, and show my drawings, in my next blog post.