Memory + Clocks

There are moments that I’ve told myself I want to remember. Taken a mental snapshot in my cerebral photo album. Then they blur, I’m lost in rooms without an exit and the current me can’t seem to remember how past me got from there to here. when visiting the Prime Meridian I have one such memory. In a section of the museum you walked down a few stairs, I think similar to a small cellar entrance, and entered a room. Every wall of this room was adorned with clocks of every caliber. The goal of these ornate clocks was to — here is the start of the blur — show how previously ships navigators needed the stars not only for direction but used them to tell time as well? That time had not been centralized. That in London it may be one o’clock while three hundred miles away in a random place called Norfolk-which-shire the time may be in fact twelve forty. The room providing me this information felt like such an add on to the actual exhibit. As if they knew not what to do with the space. Then someone who must have been so passionate about this idea of disconnected time finally took the podium and caught a break and proposed how to use the space.
I hold this room in memory. I couldn’t tell you how to get there from the front entrance or even where in the museum the room may exist. I don’t recall the room connecting to the clock room but it was a dead end in the tour and required you double back. A final stop of disconnected clocks.