The clock that no longer tells the time

Text: an original contemporary personal-column-style practice extract.

The council notice said the stopped clock above the market hall would be removed. Its hands had been fixed at ten past four for years, and the notice treated that as the end of the argument: a clock that could not tell the time had no purpose.

I had arranged to meet my brother beneath it on my first day in town. He was late, I was early, and we both found the same place without needing to describe a doorway or choose a side of the square. Since then, I have heard people give directions by the clock: not to check the hour, but because its cracked blue face is hard to mistake. A child once asked me whether the hands had stopped during a storm. I did not know. We stood there making up possible endings for a machine whose real story had disappeared.

The clock is not a reliable timekeeper, and repairing its mechanism would certainly cost money. But taking down the face would remove more than a faulty instrument. It would erase a meeting point and a small invitation to wonder about what happened there. Keep the clock, I say, but do not pretend it still does its old job. A town can make room for an object whose usefulness is not measured in minutes.

In this extract, the writer challenges the view that a stopped town clock has no purpose.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.