First of all, my thanks to all who commented on my last piece, enquiring after the health of Andrew. I’m pleased to say he’s responded well to some tinkering, cleaning and a judicious drop of oil. He seems very much his old self again. So, we settle him back into his place, let his ticking resume, forming a gentle background to the days. Well, not so gentle, actually. In fact, he’s quite a lively character, a similar rate of ticking to a wind-up wristwatch – which is quite brisk. If he were any louder, I don’t think my good lady would give him houseroom.

Some of us like a ticking clock, others can’t abide them. I suppose it’s down to whether you were brought up with one or not. Indeed, so sensitive are some of us these days to extraneous noise, there is a market for “silent” bedside clocks – not allowed even to tick softly once per second. We had an early version, which met with my good lady’s approval until I was foolish enough to point out it did tick – just once every fifteen seconds. Claims of insomnia ensued. Fortunately, the newer types are completely silent, so harmony is restored. But oh, how I love a ticking clock!

Perhaps the loudest ticker I have is Norman, banished to my study, back of house. He’s the older brother of my clocks, dating to the inter-war years, probably 1935. He’s typically, beautifully Art-Deco in style, boasts a full Westminster Chime and has the steady beat of a big brass pendulum. The guy I bought him off, some forty years ago, had completely restored him. That guy’s name was Norman.

Norman was a colleague and shop supervisor, though formerly a craftsman. He was originally multi-skilled and possessed an eye for precision. I reckon he would have been apprenticed during the early post-war period. Then, much later, as a manager, he kept returning to the tools for a hobby – restoring old clocks – since the tools, precision metalworking and making, were his calling. Which raises the question: is management a calling?

In my own later years, working in the engineering industry, it seemed the ambition of many youngsters was to be fast-tracked to project management, bypassing as much of the hands-on stuff as possible. Indeed, I encountered many a callow youth I had to be polite to, as one never knew if one would be working for them in a few years’ time. Very few I met possessed any affinity for tools, or indeed for deep technical work in general. Many could not communicate even basic geometry by drawing, or think in three dimensions, which had once been a prerequisite for an engineering position, and certainly for Norman and me. But the world, it seemed, had moved on. Laptops and spreadsheets were now the tools of the trade.

Norman was close to retirement when I knew him, a grand old silver-haired gentleman – old he seemed at least to me, though no older than I am now, which does not seem very old at all. At least, not to me. Others – those aspirant baby-faced project managers – might disagree.

But again: is management a calling? I don’t mean to downplay the importance of the administrative function, nor the management of projects. Indeed, in our post-industrial societies, it’s pretty much all there is, now, with anything below it strictly minimum-waged. Norman adapted well to his position though, had a reputation for being a fair-minded supervisor, occasionally grumpy, but generally well regarded by his men. And as I say, he shifted his calling into other avenues – took it home with him, to his workshop, his hobby-bench.

But no, as a generic term, I wonder if there is not something more evasive about the calling to management. For another thing I noticed was the mobility: responsibilities were not allowed to become burdensome, so roles were switched. In charge of one thing today, something else tomorrow. You never could pin a professional managerialist down. Norman, on the other hand, took forty years – a slow progression, a deepening, a Herculean shouldering of burdens, and an earned degree of soul.

We might say then a true calling requires weight. There is a kind of gravitational pull that draws a person down into the specificity of their work. A craft does this naturally: it binds you to materials, to process, to the stubbornness of the real. The medical and the teaching professions also do this in their own ways, and have suffered their own dreadful losses in recent times. But management – at least as it is commonly practised – seems almost to have purposely evolved to avoid such gravity.

Indeed, it possesses an airy, mobile, unburdened archetype. One is forever moving on, moving through the next post, the next reorganisation, the next initiative. Nothing is allowed to accumulate, and therefore nothing roots down. Norman, by contrast, let forty years of metal filings settle into his pockets like a ship’s ballast, aiding a steady course. He stayed long enough for the place, the people, even the temper of the machines to shape a character. That is what I hear in the ticking of his clock, now: not efficiency, nor ambition, but depth – something earned.

But like Norman – like me too, I suppose – that kind of workplace, that kind of world, is now largely a thing of the past, and we must let it go. Still, I listen, and I wonder if anything comes close to replacing it, for this is not nostalgia for a lost era; more for a mode of being. These old clocks, you see… they don’t just tell the time. In fact, they’re not about telling the time at all. Your phone will do that much better these days. No, it’s more I think the times they have known. As such, they become the keepers of our stories. And the best stories don’t just look back with fondness for something lost. They ask questions about our future.

Have a think about it. What objects in your own life carry the weight of stories? What do they say about the world we’ve lost – or gained?