The last watch
I thought I would treat myself.
Eight or nine years ago I bought myself a new watch. It was nothing fancy, though in some respects it was too fancy. My needs were simple – I wanted an analog dial with a digital date and day display. The watch I got had just that, though it also threw in a clatter of other functions which in the main are duplicated on my phone.
I have a rake of phone numbers stored on my phone. I can’t see the point in storing any of them on my watch. Similarly, the stop-watch and timer on my phone are easier to use. There is an argument to be made that an alarm on my watch could be handy but again my phone has a decent alarm with the facility to use a pleasant sound to alert me. Functions to tell me the time in different time zones is something I can never see myself using. All of these and more are on my watch and they can remain buried so far as I am concerned.
The watch does have two features of interest. One is a ten year battery, which on the face of it [pun intended] is a good economy as it is cheaper to buy a new watch every ten years than to buy ten batteries. The other feature is that it’s apparently waterproof to 50 meters. This is a handy little feature which will indicate that I am either dead or on the point of death, as the only conceivable reason I could be at that depth would be that I’m trapped in a sinking ship.
The one feature I didn’t like about my watch was that it was difficult to read. Silver hands on a white dial? Not smart and my own fault for choosing that design.
So my new treat is a new watch. It is identical in all respects to my last one except that it has silver hands on a black dial. It is so much easier to read and I also have another ten years of battery life.
I ordered it online some time ago and then all but forgot about it.
Yesterday I was going out and noticed that someone had tossed an old bit of plastic over my gate. I get the odd drop of rubbish that blows around and ends up in my garden so this was nothing extraordinary. This one had ended up between two bins and behind a rock and was barely visible. I pulled out the sopping wet bit of plastic and realised it was in fact a package addressed to me. God only knows how long it lay there and we have had some pretty stormy weather in the last few days. The cunt of a delivery bloke had just fucked it over the gate without bothering to even ring the doorbell. This also is nothing new.
So I am wearing my new watch. It is very easy to read.
And luckily it’s waterproof to 0 meters.
I never cared much for wrist watches, they always seemed to be in the way. My phone does everything (and more) than a watch will do. I do have one watch: an Elgin pocket watch that my father got me in 1970 as a birthday gift. I rarely carry it with me, but it gets wound every morning.
I got my first one back in ’61. It just became a habit then to wear one ever since. I suppose that, like trousers, I could go out without but it wouldn’t somehow seem quite right.
Much like the first two requirements on that list, I imagine….
A glance at the wrist is a hell of a lot simpler than faffing around with pockets and pass-codes?
Bought myself a Citizen solar powered watch that in theory should last indefinately, the date also never needs altering as it caters for leap years as well as the varying months.
Whilst its easy to read in all conditions having large clear numbers and the best luminosity i’ve come across, the stop watch facility and altering the time when the clocks go forwards/back is so complicated i have each time to refer to the manual.
Hence its duties these days are as an expensive ornament and i’ve bought a startlingly similar looking Wenger with battery power, its also a chrono but much simpler for a technophobe like i.
I like traditional thick brown leather wrist straps, tried a metal wrist strap once or twice but not the safest practice in my work.
For years I wore my fathers old WWII watch. But mechanical watches need attention one in a while and the last service cost over £150. A new Seiko solar powered watch cost £75, looks near-enough like the old watch, no need to open it up to replace a battery so it stays (100M) water-resistant. Lasted five years so far which is longer than the service intervals on the old watch.