(I can't be bothered with analogue clocks - growing up with a sufficiency of digital ones that just had the time written on them, decoding an analogue clock face never became intuitive.)
That stunned me. I can see how it can happen, but I'd not thought of the possibility in our world, this country in the late 20th century. I can't remember reading a clock face not being automatic, much faster than reading the numbers, though I can remember remembering not being able to do it, when I was small. I realised many years ago that numbers on the face are unnecessary. I actually prefer number-free faces. No distraction.
I wonder if that's just having learned it thoroughly, or if it's something to do with different people
I'm sure I've talked about this before.
Before I was born, my parents lived in various parts of Africa for about ten years, and we spent a couple of years in The Gambia before moving back the the UK permanently. As such, most of the things that were in the house I grew up in were either old and important enough to have been in long-term storage for most of the 70s, the few items that had been worth air-freighting around, or things that were bought new as they were needed in the early-mid 80s, when digital clocks were cheap and trendy.
Which meant that the analogue clocks of my childhood consisted of my dad's watch, my mum's watch (proper old-school nurse's one with a smooth second hand movement) and the one on the windowsill in the kitchen that was out of child eye-line (though mum would get it down so we could play with the novelty of ticking and winding occasionally). Meanwhile there were various appliances with integrated digital clocks, a couple of new clock-radios with digital displays, my brother and I both had digital alarm clocks in our bedrooms, and as we got older - like most children of the 80s - we were so amazingly primitive that cheap beepy digital watches with garish straps seemed like a pretty neat idea.
Obviously I was still taught how to read an an analogue clock in the usual way - it being a staple of small-child education, but because all the useful time sources in the environment I grew up in were digital, it's a skill that never really became intuitive. As I became old enough to choose my own clocks, I naturally opted for digital displays, because as I say, they've just got the time written on them. Obviously I still need to read an analogue clock in public places or in pictures from time to time, but not often enough to get really good at it. They remain more of a geometry exercise than an intuitive display.
I wonder if this trend will continue amongst later generations? I suppose the average person's under 30's watch is a mobile phone, though technology has progressed to the point where you can have analogue displays on your digital device if you want to. We've also accepted that while digital timepieces are cheap, accurate and ubiquitous, they're not cool, and in the rare event of buying a timepiece for it's own sake, the display is probably more likely to be analogue. Dedicated public clocks (in stations etc.) tend to be analogue, except when they're the time displayed in the corner of a screen of information.
And maybe most people are just better at it than I am, in spite of not actually using the skill very often?
I also struggle to read joined-up writing, for broadly similar reasons - by the time I was in my teens, cheap computer printing had become sufficiently common that hand-written notices and letters were a rarity, and most people print or use block capitals on signs and labels.
