This clock has been in our family for donkey's years, but it has never, in my memory, worked. In fact, it is a cheap item, the face is made of cardboard and it is not of substantial construction. However, it is one of the few things which survives which my grandad owned and he would have probably looked at it most days. In addition, although it doesn't work, it retains some pent up energy from when it was last wound up and it occasionally makes an eerie grinding noise. This noise I take to be residual energy emanating from my grandfather's existence - a bit like the background noise of the big bang (which was the source of the inspiration for the Higgs-Boson project and the search for the so called "god particle"). So, in that sense, I can link my grandad with particles which interacted so extraordinarily with each other in the first trillionth of a nano second at the start of the universe. The clock resides on our mantle piece and now, with this information, I feel I can offer the reader something of an explanation of its purpose, because, as you can see, it is not for time keeping.