The inside of most 91-year-old’s bedrooms are filled with picture frames, but Jock Findlay would rather hang 76 bejewelled clocks on his walls.
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The walls and tables of Scottish-born Mr Findlay's room, at a Brisbane aged care facility, are adorned with colourful clocks, which he spends most of his day decorating.
But in his room, bursting with sparkly sequins, many would not take notice of his favourite one of them all.
A simple wooden clock that he made from an old timer used to turn on gas street lights last century.
Mr Findlay fashioned the antique himself, not long after his father had sent him off to work in a jewellery store at age 15.
It was there, in the small Highlands town of Kingussie more than 70 years ago, that his love for keeping time was forged.
“My dad said, ‘There’s a job waiting for you at the jewellery shop. I don’t want any arguments, you’re going in there'. I didn't like it straight away," Mr Findlay admitted.
"The first fortnight I worked in the jewellery store I was just polishing glass cabinets and sweeping floors. But then the boss moved me up to the watch bench and I was repairing them.
"I didn’t have much time to learn, but I learned everything."
Mr Findlay said he spent only a couple of years at the jewellery store before he was shipped off to Nazi Germany to serve with the British army.
His little wooden gas clock travelled with him.
"When I was in the army, I kept it in the bottom of my kit bag and I brought it with me over here to Australia and made the case for it,” Mr Findlay said.
After the war, the Scotsman saw an advertisement to migrate to Australia for just $12.
So he packed his clock, sailed to Australia and never returned to Scotland.
"I never went back to visit. I think I would have taken one step off the airplane and felt claustrophobic," Mr Findlay said.
The 76 clocks he had made, fixed and decorated - wall, mantle, chronometer, torsion, pendulum, sculpture and cuckoo varieties – all came with Mr Findlay when he moved into an aged care facility in north Brisbane a few years ago.
Mr Findlay said he was fascinated by the mechanics of what makes analogue clocks tick and also was in charge of maintaining a grandfather clock at the home that is older than he is.
“If there’s problems with any of the clock’s movements I dismantle them and repair them. Even if it’s a battery-powered clock you strip them down and wash all the parts because there might be just a tiny speck between the teeth that is enough to stop it from working,” Mr Findlay said.
Carinity Clifford House customer service coordinator Chris Profke said Mr Findlay was known to the other residents and staff as "Mr Fix-it".
“Jock’s decorated all of these clocks that were plain-faced clocks. He painstakingly adds all of the sequins on and makes new hands for them and puts new numbers on them,” Mr Profke said.
But watches are not the only thing Mr Findlay fixes.
“He’s the resident cobbler and fixes a lot of the ladies’ shoes. He has got the talent to be able to make things and a lot of people don’t have that creativity or the skills,” Mr Profke said.
In fact, there isn’t much Mr Findlay hasn’t tinkered with, from the Harley Davidson motorcycle he used to ride in his youth to Clifford House’s kitchen utensils.
“The food scoops in the dining area, sometimes the gears jam so I will dismantle and fix them. There’s a special way to do that,” Mr Findlay said.
“You should never say you can’t fix something. There’s always a way around things, even if you have to make parts.”
Mr Findlay said nothing compared with the sheer joy of seeing clock hands ticking over after mastering the intricate process of balancing and assembling the tiny machine.
"Some people like putting photographs up; I hate photographs, I just put the clocks up," he said.
"I like to just sit here, listen to music and think up new designs."
