The holistic watch and clock repair shop

I have a small carriage clock which I was given by my parents as a graduation present. It became cranky and stopped working smoothly, so I looked around for a convenient clock repair shop. I checked on the internet, and there was a repair shop on Ridley Road which had good customer reviews. I noted that this shop had rather odd opening times, but I turned up one Friday afternoon, on my folding bicycle.

The shop was a small one, tucked away behind the fruit and vegetable stalls of Ridley Road. I noted that there seemed to be quite a queue of people waiting, and I took my place. There was a chap sitting on a stool near the entrance, who wasn’t a customer, but also didn’t seem to have an offocial role within the shop. He greeted me cheerily and said he observed that I had come on my horse. We exchanged some badinage about horses and bicycles, and he told me that he used to ride a bike, but could not longer do so due to a hernia.

I finally moved into the shop, and wondered what sort of a place I found myself in. It had display cabinets full of watches on both lateral walls, and a counter at the front. There were two men in muslim dress behind the counter. One, who seemed to be the owner, was dressed in smart white clothes with a white cap, and was addressed by some of the customers as ‘hadji’. The other chap was dressed similarly but all in black, and seemed to be entirely concentrated on a computer in front of him. Behind him was a video monitor with sound turned down low, showing an imam giving an impassioned address within a mosque.

The owner, or ‘hadji’, was doing all the watch and clock repair work. He worked incredibly deftly and I was astonished when I saw him dismantle the watch which the customer ahead of me had brought in, carefully taking off the tiny hands and laying them down on a mat, taking the casing apart, and looking into the interior workings with a jeweller’s magnifying glass screwed into his right eye. He didn’t use much in the way of tools, and when he looked at me and told me that he would attend to me soon, I complimented him on his steady hands. He smiled and went on with his work. As he worked, he kept up a steady flow of mostly one-sided conversation, addressed really to the shop as a whole, but also to the man whose watch he was attending to. I found myself attending to the impromptu talk, which was all about faith and its place in daily life. He talked about the importance of respecting one’s neighbours, and he talked about the value of money: needed for support of the family, but a pitfall for the man who becomes greedy for it. I said to myself that there was not a single thing he said which I disagreed with or which didn’t match the values of my own faith tradition.

There were fairly constant interruptions, with many a ‘salaam aleikum’ and ‘aleikum salaam’ being exchanged. A man came in, quite agitated, saying in very broken English that he wanted the hadji to return to him his wife’s watch which had been brought in for repair. She was going away and needed it. The hadji said to him that the watch had been dropped in water and unless it were taken care of, it would be ruined. He asked the man to wait. He finished the job on the watch of the man in front of me, deftly putting all the tiny pieces together. He said to me ‘Welcome to the holistic watch repair shop! Sorry to keep you waiting’. I said, ‘Please feel free to serve this man first’, indicating the chap who wanted the watch returned. The man beamed at me, and I had a nice smile from the hadji. The hadji retrieved the watch, opened the case, and subjected the workings of the watch to an impromptu heat treatment provided by the live flame of a bic lighter, saying that it was important to remove the humidity at all possible. He then put the watch back together and handed it to the owner, saying to him: ‘Bring this back in when you get back, and I’ll do a proper job on it.’

He then turned to me, thanked me for being patient and asked what I had come for. I explained the problem with my clock, hazarding a guess that I might have over-wound it. In no time at all he had the clock in pieces on the mat, and inspected the workings. He comment that the clock looked very ‘dry’ and maybe just needed a bit of lubricant. He used some WD-40, and some other oil, and dismantled the spring mechanism. He commented that the idea of ‘over-winding’ was a myth, and showed me a tiny ratchet mechanism which he said prevented such a thing from ever happening.

While this was happening, my friend and his stool from outside had moved into the shop, and there was more conversation about the nature of faith and the life of the faithful person. The chap on the stool (called Ali) said that he thought there were five main things that were important for a faith-based life, and listed them. I felt he was spot on, and the hadji and I agreed with him. There were also constant interruptions. A young guy pushed his way past the queue and asked the hadji whether he could spare some glue to repair his sunglasses. The hadji, with an apologetic look at me, asked to see the sunglasses, and gave it as his opinion that regretfully glue would not work because the surfaces to be stuck together were too small. The young man seemed satisfied that he had had his problem listened to, and went off.

The hadji put my clock back together and handed it over to me. I reached for my wallet, and he said, ‘No, I’m not going to charge you for that.’ I insisted and he said no, he wasn’t going to accept any money from me (I was aware that if I had left the clock at an average repair shop and collected it again a few days later I could have expected to be charged £80 or more.) I said, well, I had a watch which needed attention and I would bring it in, and he said ‘Good, then I can charge you double!’ We both laughed, and he reached over to shake my hand and asked for my name. I told him my name and asked his, which was Muhammad, and Ali on the stool and I also exchanged introductions and hand shakes.

I left the shop in very good spirits. All seemed right with the world, and everybody around me seemed friendly and well-disposed. I felt as if I had received a blessing, which of course I had!

Sept 2015