Next year they tried again, but still no joy. It was playful anarchy, and proof, if it was needed, that the French will protest about anything, but it brought to mind a more serious incident from more than a century before. On 15 February 1894, a French anarchist called Martial Bourdin met an unfortunate fate in the grounds of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the traditional home of empirical timekeeping. Bourdin was carrying a bomb, and when it exploded accidentally it blew off one of his hands and ripped a hole in his stomach.
When two Observatory staff ran from their office at the sound of the explosion, they found Bourdin still alive. But he survived only half an hour, and when his body was examined by the police they found he was carrying a large amount of cash; it was fleeing money, they suggested, quite enough to get him swiftly back to France once his mission had been accomplished. But what precisely was his mission? Speculation gripped London for weeks, and a decade later it inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Bourdin’s motive remains unclear. He may have been carrying a bomb for an accomplice. He may have simply been trying to cause panic and chaos, the way terrorists aim to do today. But the most romantic theory, and the most French, is that he may have been trying to stop time.
The people at Fonacon do not hold up Bourdin as a hero, not in these straitened times. But they do possibly share an ambition. On New Year’s Eve 2008, Fonacon tried to stop time once more, and they had a new slogan: ‘It was better right now!’ As a man named Marie-Gabriel explained, ‘We’re saying no to the tyranny of time, no to the merciless onslaught of the calendar, and yes to staying put in 2008!’ The protest in Paris saw the largest turnout yet, with about a thousand people gathering to boo the arrival of the new year on the Champs-Élyseés. The clocks struck midnight, and the protestors struck the clocks, and then, merde, it was 2009.
The idea that time may be stopped in its tracks we happily recognise as a fanciful one, or the stuff of movies. If, in revolutionary France, such a thing once seemed plausible, it is a desire we should credit to optimism and enthusiasm, and to the fact that another revolution, a revolution in travel, was yet to occur. A train was coming down the track, and it was a solid and earnest thing: in terms of time, the train would change everything.
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1 The French had another shot at time transformation in 1897, albeit on a modified scale. The Commission de décimalisation du temps suggested maintaining the 24-hour day, but changing to 100-minute hours with 100-second minutes. The proposal lay on the table for three years but was brought into effect for nought minutes.
2 Rather than face the guillotine, the principal architect of the calendar, Gilbert Romme, fell on his own sword almost a year later on 17 June 1795 (or, as he would have preferred, 29 Prairial).
3 See Sanja Perovic, ‘The French Republican Calendar’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 1.
4 We are vaguely familiar too with the Julian months: Januarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Iunius, Julius, Augustus, September, October, November, December. In the first centuries of the modern era, newly appointed Roman emperors made their own egotistical modifications. The most extreme was Commodus, who delighted in changing all the months to variations of his own adopted names: Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius, Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus and Exsuperatorius. And then he was assassinated, and subsequent emperors changed the months back.
5 Although, as with the revolution of 1789, time momentarily, and perhaps mythically, did stand still. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin claims (in On the Concept of History, 1940) that ‘during the evening of the first skirmishes . . . it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris’. Two plausible reasons: to show contempt for an old unconstitutional establishment, and to mark the exact time of its overthrow. Then again, bullets may just have been flying everywhere.
6 Quoted in ‘Dying of the Past’ by Michael S. Roth, History and Memory, vol. 3, no. 1 (Indiana University Press).
7 Today’s diseases associated with time? There are many: ADHD, cancer, smartphone addiction.
Mallard: small boy not included.
Chapter Three
The Invention of the Timetable
i) The Fastest Thing You Ever Did See
Do you plan on being alive for the next two-and-a-half years? If the answer is yes, you may begin building Mallard. This magnificent British steam locomotive, streamlined and garter blue, is available for construction each week from your newsagent, and if you keep the faith for 130 weeks, and buy all the bits required and assemble them, you will end up with a 500-millimetre-long engine and tender (almost 20 inches), weighing about 2 kilos.
Mallard was originally built in Doncaster in 1938, but in 2013 the publishers Hachette offered the amateur modeller the chance to build a highly detailed replica as a part-work, a precision-tooled miniature of the ‘O’-gauge variety, designed to run on 32mm track (‘track not included’). The model is made from brass, white metal, etched metal and an intricate metallic casting process called ‘lost wax’, and requires not only considerable patience and skill to assemble, but also tools including round-nose pliers and top-cutter pliers, and a recommendation to wear protective gloves and a face mask. When you have finished making your model, you may then paint it (paint not included).
Issue no. 1, priced at only 50p, consists of the first metal parts and a magazine that tells you a bit about Mallard’s history and great railroad enterprises such as the Trans-Siberian Railway. The magazine is hole-punched for easy storage, and, after a few weeks, the magazines should be put in a binder (first binder and dividers included free with your second magazine; subsequent binders not included).
The first choice you must make is whether to superglue or solder (solder not included and not recommended). Instructions for the first week’s parts, which will make the driver’s cab, come in twelve sections and include using the top-cutter pliers to remove all parts from the fret, smoothing the edges with wet and dry sandpaper, punching three dots in each tab to form raised rivets, and placing the left-front cab window bead in position with the pliers. If you actually like doing this you will be delighted with the free Modeller’s Magnifying Glass to inspect the smaller parts (if you reply within 10 days), and a black-and-white A3 print of the original Mallard in thunderous action down a slope.
Issue 2, priced at only £3.99, contains the next part of your model (nose section and boiler skirts) and a feature on the West Highland Line. If you subscribe, you will also get a magnificent set of Mallard drink coasters in a tin. Not much happens with issue 3, apart from the arrival of the main boiler and a price hike to £7.99 (the standard price for each issue from now on), but with issue 4 you get a free Modeller’s Toolkit, including a stainless steel ruler and two mini-clamps. With issue 5 there are details of how to motorise your Mallard when you have completed it (motor not included).1
The