Pocket watch and rose on a forearm

The clock above platform four has been four minutes slow since Tuesday, and Mr Okafor from the parcels office swears it is the damp in the works, not the man who wound it. I have told him the damp has nothing to do with it. I have watched Alfie Pryce climb that ladder every morning at six with his tin of oil and his bad knee, and I have watched the minute hand go back to twelve like a dog that will not sit. So you tell me, Ruth, who is slow.

Your father's watch came back from the jeweller's on Friday. The little gears are all in place, the glass is clean, and he has written the date on the card in his tidy hand, the way he did when he was courting Mum. He says it will keep time for another forty years if nobody drops it on the platform. I told him nobody is going to drop it, Dad, you are going to put it in your waistcoat and leave it there.

Someone left a rose on the bench by the ticket hall yesterday, with a note tucked into the stem that said only, "For the nine fifteen, if she comes." She did not come. The nine fifteen went out on time, to the second, and the guard blew his whistle as if it had personally insulted him. I stood there holding the stem and thought how strange it is that a thing can be perfectly accurate and still arrive too late.

I am sending this on the morning train so it reaches you before the post does. Write back and tell me what the time is where you are. I will set my own watch by yours, and we will both be wrong by the same four minutes, which is the closest I have come to being right about anything this year.