My Dad loved his watches, which was ironic for a man with such a questionable record for punctuality. He had a fine collection of watches too, gathered over many years. There was his waterproof watch with the eerie green glow-in-the-dark face which he said would always be useful if he went scuba diving. (He never did in his life, nor ever intended to.) It kept perfect time, but, he said, was annoying in that there were no numbers on the dial. While deducing the time was no great intellectual challenge, if the watch was, say, by the side of the bed in the middle of the night, you could waste a good deal of sleepy thought trying to work out where noon was.
Then there was the mechanical watch which showed not only the time in London, but also in three other time zones, but kept appallingly inaccurate time; or the clever chunky watch which came with stopwatch and three counters for recording where in the day you were with a single dial moving through twenty four points, and two smaller dials for the tenths and hundreds of a second. With its numbers written on with an incredible delicacy, he loved to look at the watch, but hated that it chaffed against his wrist. There was his radio controlled watch – perfectly synchronized, he’d proudly say, to a cesium clock in Hull, whose oscillations were used to precisely divide that elusive concept, time, into neat, measurable chunks. Then one day something clearly went wrong with the oscillation of cesium, for suddenly his clock was three hours forward, then three hours back, then stopped altogether, and with a sigh, he went back to a more mechanical approach to time. The watch most reliably on his wrist was a mechanical watch, with a plain brown strap and simple face, which he loved for being easy, comfortable and nothing which he felt in danger of having stolen or would be worried about losing. It was easy to read but lost, he informed us, four seconds a week. “It may not sound like much,” he exclaimed, “But after a month can you imagine how much time you’ll have lost?” (To which the answer was a resounding, mathematical, yes.” The indignation in his voice at the notion – that time might actually be stolen from him by four second increments – resounded so strongly that after a while, he got in the habit of setting his clock by the pips broadcast on the BBC. One week ‘Today’ overan, and the BBC was late, and he was flustered and infuriated, no longer sure if his watch was four seconds fast, four seconds slow or, even worse, some unknown quantifier in the middle.
“What is time?” he’d ask. “An axis on the graph? A mere component in a question of distance travelled at a speed? You cannot hold it, cannot hoard it, cannot stop it, can only count it, and what exactly are you counting? The oscillations of cesium within an arbitrary unit of measurement?” These questions, interesting as they were, invariably arose when running late to catch an airplane…
At the end of the day, I don’t think it was time, per se, that led my Dad to acquiring so many watches. I think it was the mechanical elegance with which we measure it, the beauty and the ingenuity that has gone into representing its passage, recording its length, fitting it into the environment in which we live. It’s the delicacy, or the cleverness, or the deceptive simplicity with which we record the passing of our days, that Dad always found in his watches.
3 comments
AdrianH says:
June 27, 2012 at 12:34 am (UTC 1 )
Nice post, Kate, I have a bit of a watch fetish, but lack of funds dictates it’s kept under control! The waterproof one you describe with the luminous green face sounds like my old TAG Huer Series 1000. William Petersen wore one in the first of the Hannibal Lecter films, ‘Manhunter’. Nice watch, but battery replacement costs silly money.
I’ve now got a customised Seiko, mechanical automatic, with a beautifully clear, easy to read face, great big hands that glow brightly, and a clear back so you can see the movement. Not pricey at all, but a pleasure to wear.
Your last paragraph really sums up what I think about watches now; and mechanical watches in particular, all those tiny, machined components, exquisitely put together, measuring the time by their continual synchronised movement.
I know watches are a bit of a bloke thing, but I think you really understand that to some of us, it’s not about ‘bling’, but craftsmanship.
Matthew says:
June 27, 2012 at 2:49 am (UTC 1 )
My current day to day watch is a large windup clockwork piece. It’s appalling at keeping the time but I find something beautiful in the idea that it will never stop ticking away the seconds (assuming that I remember to wind it daily) and will never halt as its battery fails.
When my previous watch battery ran out I felt thrown off kilter as I’m one of those people who constantly check the time even if they have no appointment or deadline to meet. I felt keenly the lack of my watch ( it never occurs to me to use the time displayed on my phone or Ipod) and much more enjoy my new windup. It’s been ticking away cheerful on my arm now for 3 years straight without pause.
And I agree Adrian, It will always be about craftsmanship in my eyes
Lorraine Robson says:
June 29, 2012 at 9:31 am (UTC 1 )
Well, what can I say, “Tempus Fugit”! I have to add that I feel naked when I can’t find my watch. Many a day has been spent with me searching for a clock so that I can see how much time I have left to complete a task. I have all but one of the watches I have ever had. From my first watch, which was a white watch with bugs bunny on the dial, to a Timex glo watch, to my current Swatch from New York that tells me what the lights from the Empire State Building mean and the Kahuna I wear to work, as it was not as resent from my parents when I asked for a nice watch to wear on a night out! (the plastic swatch was their response to that request… Doesn’t quite go with the nice tops and dresses…)
Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t have the white watch anymore either… That’s how I ended up with the Swatch, that went walkies…