Felix has a new watch.

Granny gave it to him, on Christmas day. It is bright red plastic, and has lovely clear hands, but it might as well be a diamond studded Rolex. Because it has been elevated to the status of Crown Jewel.

Every morning, we have the Great Putting On Of The Watch. Felix’s little wrist is rather small and Phil has done that thing all Dads do sometime, punching an extra hole further up the watch strap. Felix comes up to me and says, Mum, will you help me put my watch on please? And we have a moment’s silence while I, with infinite concentration, play hunt-the-extra-hole, and Felix enjoys the ceremony of donning such a very grown-up artefact.

It is extremely useful, this watch, because Felix can tell the time.

Phil never wears a watch: it tends to get lost or dismantled. My wristwatches are termtime-only devices to remind me how little temporal play I have: they are a stricture, a corset, a hindrance. Holidays are about letting time really hang out. And I do, without the aid of a watch.

Telling the time for us, then, tends to be about squinting at faraway clocks for me, while Phil has developed the uncanny ability to estimate the passing of time with reasonable accuracy. What is the time, I will ask Phil, because I really need to know. And he will say, quarter to twelve. And I will strain every muscle, physical and mental, to access a clock to find out if he is indeed correct. And he invariably is, but I am left wondering why I bothered asking him when I seem to have to check his timekeeping by bolting off to a clock anyway.

So now, when Phil and I want to know what the time is, we simply ask Felix.

“Felix, is it time to turn up at the restaurant yet? ”

The seven-year old acquires a Brunel-like gravity. Wait a moment, his body language cautions, while I check my instruments. He lifts his wrist with the very large bright red disk on it, and stares intently at its face just as the great Marc and his son Isambard Kingdom might have scrutinised the instruments relating to the travelling shield which burrowed under London.

“It is……” The suspense is generally killing. “……three minutes to twelve!”

Hurrah. Dinner time. Felix’s watch triumphs again, and we traipse off towards the Italian which we intend to grace with our company.

And the minutes tick by. Each one a unique gemstone, a silver instant never to be experienced again.

We are blase about those seconds, those minutes.Less so, about the years.

As I write, there remain 41 hours to 2010;  2,460 minutes; 147,600 seconds. When did we become able to measure the passing time with such relentless accuracy?

Yesterday I gazed out on the foggy gloom which has settled across our land, and I thought: a sundial would have been useless today.

Its Egyptian creators had a solid supply of sun, but England does not. The twin Egyptian concept of telling the time by the stars, using two vertical plumb lines and a meridian line to gauge when the stars cross a certain line: that necessitates being able to see the stars.

Water clocks fared better: they measured the time using a constant flow of water. Eventually water clocks became mechanical works of art. Athens in the first century BC boasted an octagonal Tower Of The Winds, a 24-hour mechanised water-clock with showed the passing of the hours, the seasons, astrological dates and periods.

And by 1088AD, just 22 years after the Normans stepped onto these shores, the 30 foot Su Song clock tower was built in Kaifeng, China: it boasted a power-driven sphere for observations, a rotating celestial globe, and five panels featuring figures who rang bells, holding signs which indicated important moments of the day.

The first mechanical clocks were beginning to appear in Europe by mediaeval times, but they were few and far between.

At times like this I think of my comfortable English mediaeval physician, Matthew Bartholomew. Susannah Gregory has created a lovely cosy set of whodunnits with a Cambridge doctor as the central character. These have the same simple storytelling technique as Christie, but an encyclopaedic knowledge of mediaeval life in Cambridge. They are undemanding and vastly entertaining; and they make excellent holiday reading.

The physician and his contemporaries deal with the passing of time in an entirely different way to ours.

When Dawn comes, they get up. They use every moment of the light available to them. In the early hours, they make their way to work nearby. Bartholomew is one of the earliest lecturers in medicine at Cambridge, and when everyone has arrived he lectures his students through the long productive hours of the morning. And they lunch together.

The later afternoon is their down-time. It is theirs to use the remainder of the light as they wish; visiting, socialising, suppering.

When the darkness comes, fires and candles are possible: but they are also costly. Most simply tuck up in bed and sleep until the dawn of the next day.

What a wonderful life, lived with the light in a spirit of approximation.

The hourglass is a romantic figure: in common usage by the fourteenth century, it holds the sands of time. Is there any more potent symbol of the passage of time than this little device?

The grains of sand trickle away. Unlike most devices to measure time, they show time as a commodity which is disappearing: they accord it a scarcity, a rarity.

Father Time strides on. Tomorrow my countrypeople will gather round that masterpiece of timekeeping to count those last seconds of this year, and greet the first of the next. We are incorrigible measurers of time.

In a 66 year lifetime, our heart beats about two and a half billion times. Perhaps because a pulse beats within us, we seek out the external beat, the pulse of time itself as it marches relentlessly on.

But our time is measured in four score years and ten: it resembles the trickling sand of an hourglass. Every minute, every second, is a treasured jewel.

And perhaps at New Year, more than any other time, these two converge: the pulse, and the sands of time: and we pause to consider both the passing of measured time, and the path of our own life.