Tick tick tick tock

There's a radio controlled clock hanging in our living room. I am particularly fond of this clock for three reasons:

1) It came from Ikea so cost something like £10
2) I like to know precisely what the time is. I am perpetually late, but I do like to know exactly how late I am.
3) As it's analogue, when the clocks move forward or back, you can literally watch the clocks go forward/back. I have managed to see this precisely once.

I was looking for a picture of my clock as I am far too lazy to take one, and I failed, but I did find the definition of a second:

The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

So now you know.

Anyway, back to the clock in the living room... The batteries are running low just now but it has enough power to remain at the right time. However, the battery does not have enough power to tick the second hand around properly. As a result the second hand is a little sparodic - ticking normally, then stopping, then ticking forwards one second, back one second, while the other two hands continue to move round regularly, always at the correct time.

Sitting watching this last night, it struck me how like life the second hand is being. You age at a steady rate, you will always be one year older on each birthday, but your life moves like the second hand, sometimes moving forward steadily, sometimes standing still and sometimes moving back and forth and getting nowhere at all.

Which puts a slightly different slant on the phrase "to recharge one's batteries".