It’s common knowledge to people of my age that time goes faster as you get older. But in our house these days it’s not only faster, but also noisier.

After decorating the lounge, we took down the old wall clock and I decided to fulfil my ambition to own a genuine Garrard clock.

Why? Because they were made in Swindon (by the firm who also made the world’s greatest turntables). So we have been on the look-out for one on eBay.

We finally got lucky and picked up a nice one for just £63, including postage. It even has a nice key, stamped with the Garrard logo. I would have paid £63 just for that.

But there was a problem. It’s a chiming pendulum clock, and the important bits inside had been disconnected and packed separately, for transit, and I realised I didn’t really know how it all worked. I knew the principles, of course, but we had never had a pendulum clock at home when I was a kid, just simple wind-ups, so I had to work it out for myself.

When I finally got it going, it was losing a minute every hour, but after some trial and error and advice from Google, it’s now keeping good time, and cheerfully chimes away, every half hour.

I’m really proud of my new clock, but my son is not so impressed.

“It looks OK,” he said, “but it’s noisy”. And when my daughter came home from university for the weekend she complained about its “weird noise”.

This made me realise that they – and probably most of their generation – have grown up in a household where there isn’t, never has been, and probably never will be, the tick-tocking of a proper clock.

The closest they had previously got to it is the one in the bathroom, which does have a faint tick as the second hand clicks round, but doesn’t tock. Otherwise, time glides by completely silently for them.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the ticking and tocking of the Garrard clock blended into the background and was drowned by the telly, so they became unaware of it, but it got me thinking.

Here I am, well into the second half of my life, with every half second now audibly marked, so I’m not sure whether I should be intimidated by it or comforted.

You see, I have this theory – and now the chance to prove it – that people who live in a house with a ticking clock are less stressed.

I also realised how fixated some of us, including me, have become by the accuracy of clocks and watches, which probably isn’t good for our health.

When I was trying to get our new old clock regulated, for instance, I felt uncomfortable with it being just slightly inaccurate. We are used to the exact time being instantly available through TV, computers and phones, and we don’t have to phone the Speaking Clock to check they are accurate, because they always are.

I started to think that modern-day stress could be partly due to our lives being synchronised with perfect clocks, and maybe if we turned time back a few decades we would find a more casual approach to timekeeping made people more relaxed.

Then I remembered the Swindon Railway Works hooter. It’s a source of huge nostalgia for some of us, but it ruled and regimented workers’ lives more than any clocks we own now, calling everybody to account, and to the precise minute.

If my son and daughter think our little clock is noisy and weird, imagine what they would say if they could hear that blowing away.