Good Wind Up

I never used to want a watch. Certainly not a fancy one. A dress watch? Seemed like an odd concept to me back then in my acerbic youth, my piss & vinegar arrogant young man’s opinions. A watch is for telling the time; a £2 plastic digital from South Shields market told the same time as a ten grand Rolex and that was the simplistic way I saw it. I did carry a watch for a while - my grandfathers old railwayman’s pocket watch - a big wind-up thing that kept perfect time (as long as you did wind it).

When I say ‘perfect time’ I don’t mean the perfect time of pedants who know all about atomic clocks and the electromagnetic frequencies of atoms; I mean good enough time for me. And anyway, in my young man’s chaotic and relatively non-timetabled life, I rarely needed to know the time so badly.

Then came the era of the mobile phone and soon we were all carrying binary-perfect synchronised time. Now we have a plethora of phones, computers, radios, televisions and a spectrum of other digital, electronic, micro-chipped, wifi, bluetoothed, giga-bitten devices, endlessly enslaving us to exactly the correct time. There is no room left for the good old reliable wrist watch… except, of course, on my wrist. And so it is, in this age of unavoidable time, I find myself wanting one. Something simple, smart, elegant, with hands that just tell the time. Something that ticks.