Wandering round Greenwich this afternoon, being silly at the Royal Observatory. Jumping back and forth across the prime meridian line (“now I’m in the east, now I’m in the west, now I’m straddling the whole world”); ogling John Harrison’s original timepieces (if you’ve read “Longitude”, then you’ll realise just how awe-inspiring these marvels really are).

And we wandered into their wonderful souvenir store. Now if only I had £1,800 to buy their top-of-the-range orrery…. I always adore unusual shops like this – and they usually throw up something that can be misused for fetish purposes!

This time, I focused in on a display of egg-timers and hour glasses. Now three minutes may be long enough to soft-boil an egg, but one can hardly make an impression on a girl in three minutes. And an hour might be deemed excessive.

But they had a device called a sermon timer – the grains slide through in exactly fifteen minutes. I had to buy one, of course: a visual tormentor to support “you may wait for fifteen minutes to think about your misbehaviour before I administer your whipping”, or a quarter-hour with hands on head to “reflect on what you’ve just learnt”.

Or, of course, to time a fifteen-minute punishment: an unusual form of ‘sermon’ to correct a girl’s misguided approach. Haron was horrified at the thought, of course.

And what a nice image of a demure maid in some Victorian rectory being called before the parson for a carefully-timed punishment, using his sermon timer….

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