Gruff Griffiths-Griffiths (who'd been given the surnames of both his father and his mother at birth) was in a very melancholy mood one Saturday morning, spending his time wandering aimlessly from room to room in his house worrying terribly about nothing in particular.
He eventually slumped down wearily in a chair by the kitchen table and looked up at the clock. It was twenty to eleven. Gruff kept his eyes on the clock, counting down the seconds from four to nought as the hand moved between each number. He found that this brought him great comfort and decided to keep doing it until he'd had enough.
Some eighteen months later, also on a Saturday morning, this time much earlier at a quarter to six, Gruff was still sat at the kitchen table counting down the seconds from four to nought, when the clock stopped abruptly before beginning to move continuously back and forth from one second to the previous one. It didn't matter much to Gruff, he wasn't really paying much attention to the finer detail of the clock any more, just looking through it and counting down from four to nought, utterly contented.
Gruff carried on staring at the clock, still showing a quarter to six and the hand that previously counted away the seconds now still, for the next thirty five years. Then, one morning, I think it was probably a Saturday, he got up extremely slowly from the table and made his way over to the mirror which hung on the kitchen wall. He took a long, hard look at himself; his greasy, grey hair down to his waist, his beard not much shorter, his eyes sunken deep inside his skull and the few teeth he had left completely rotten. He was a crooked, broken old man with terrifically long nails.
Having contemplated his reflection for a while, he then uttered his first words for nearly thirty seven years.
'Shit,' he said. 'I've wasted my life.'
