The Atmos Clock–It Runs On Thin Air

Saturday saw us drinking champagne outdoors at a wedding reception in Wirral. Last night we turned the central heating on for the first time this year. Talk about a change in the weather. Yes, this column is about atmospheric changes, but actually clocks, not barometers. They’re called Atmos clocks and they’re expensive when new, incredibly accurate and they run quite literally on thin air.

Click here to see a slideshow of Atmos Clocks

I’ve been fascinated by clocks ever since I was a boy. I used to take them apart in ham-fisted attempts to repair them – sometimes I actually got them to work again, but not often. I think I caught the bug from my father, an inveterate tinkerer. I remember the time he tried to get a cuckoo clock to work using bottles of tomato and brown sauce as weights to drive the going and striking trains. But I digress.

It’s possible to pay anything from £8,000-10,000 for a new Atmos clock, so well out of my reach. The nearest I ever came was a £95, so-called anniversary clock which dated from the

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Stuff U Sell makes eBay selling simple

I wrote to a reader last week,  a lady who wanted to know how best to sell a silk head scarf from the 1976 Canadian Olympics. Either sold as a souvenir, or else perhaps given to competitors, the scarf was printed with the Olympic torch and listings of all the events.

Ironically, I came across the scarf, illustrated here, in a sale at The Canterbury Auction Galleries, also last week. Commemorating the "Olympic Winners of XIV Olympiad, London 1948", it was described as having been designed by Ena Pitfield, devised by Arnold Lever and printed

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