Notes

The man with the cello case was on the 23:52 again. He slept from the first station, as before, with one hand on the case as if it might leave without him. I have now seen him four times and never seen him awake, and I have decided that I do not want to know where he plays. Some regulars are better left as weather.

After the essay about my kitchen clock, readers sent me their own wrong clocks: fast, slow, and in one case running backwards on purpose. The most common gap is five minutes. The record is twenty-two, held by a reader who says she has never once been late and never once known what time it was. I am printing no names. Every one of these clocks is a household secret.

The big clock in the station hall does something I had never noticed before this spring: its second hand sweeps round a little faster than a second, then stops at the top of the minute and waits, perfectly still, for a signal from somewhere else. Then the minute hand jumps and it begins again. It keeps time by being briefly wrong and then agreeing. I can think of worse ways to live.

The cold wind came down from the plateau overnight and by morning the harbour was twenty centimetres lower than the table promised. The old steps by the fish market had a green stripe nobody had seen since last winter. Taped to the corner of the tide table in the office window was the handwritten note, the same three words as always. A boy was copying them into a notebook. I did not stop him.

I bought a second-hand collection of essays this week for the price of a coffee. Three different readers have written in its margins over what looks like fifty years: one in fountain pen, all question marks; one in pencil, who underlines and writes “yes”; and one in biro, who corrects the others. The biro reader is always right and I like him least. The book is better for all three of them.

The bakery behind the market is closed on Sundays. Still, at a quarter past nine, two windows in the street open, and stay open for a minute, and close again. I watched it happen three Sundays running. Nobody was waiting for bread. They were waiting for the bell, out of habit, and when it did not ring they went back to their mornings a little disappointed and, I think, a little reassured that the week had a shape.

Clearing out a kitchen drawer, I found a bus timetable from 2009, folded into eight and soft as cloth. Every route on it still runs. Not one of them runs at the same times. The 14 used to leave at seven minutes past the hour; now it leaves at twelve. Somewhere between the two a meeting was held, and five minutes of everyone’s mornings were moved, and nobody remembers agreeing to it.

A reader who grew up on the far shore wrote to say that in fog the ferry sounds two short blasts, not one long one. The deckhand confirms it. The long blast is for clear mornings. I have corrected the essay and I am grateful: there is nothing like a correction to prove that someone read to the end.