My most beloved watch is my rarest. Strangely, it’s also my cheapest. It gets the least wrist time of anything I own and I value it above all of it.
The Timex Snoopy Marlin Space Traveler.
A cartoon beagle on the dial, he has a space helmet. It’s all very streetwear. The watch that was a birthday gift from my wife. She knew exactly what she was doing: my grandfather was a Timex man, and the two of us used to read the Peanuts strip together. He was a space nut as well.
There is a great deal more to it than that. That’s Part 3.
Its photo is sitting in front of me in Pixelmator as I write this, and it’s going to have to wait, because it doesn’t mean anything to you yet. Not until you know what came before it.
Aficionados won’t say this about watches too often: they are a rotten way of telling the time. The phone in your pocket is atomic-accurate and it came free with the purchase. My Rolex likely gains a few seconds a day and I paid handsomely for the privilege. So if you’re wearing one (mechanical or quartz, anything without a screen), you are not solving a problem. You’re doing something else entirely. Something wonderful.
Which makes the whole business an exercise in humanity. Artistry. Personal expression. Vanity…or significance rather.
A watch helps you track time. It also, somehow, sits there as a measure of the soul.
Perhaps your father gave you one and it sparked the itch. Perhaps you’d like the room to know what you earn. Perhaps you’re simply taken with the craftsmanship and the gentlemanly pursuit of it all. I don’t judge the motive. We’ve all got our vices. Five or six, in my case. Whisky, wine, wom… I’m too much of a gent to name them all. Boys with toys.
But there’s a thought behind it. (I refuse to type the buzzword of the moment. You know the one.)
Let me go back.
Before any of it, there was a Fossil. University era, fairly substantial, a chronograph, I’m told. It’s at my mum’s house somewhere and I couldn’t describe the dial to you if you paid me. That isn’t a slight on Fossil. It’s a slight on me. I wore that watch to be seen wearing a watch, and a thing you wear to be seen in leaves no mark on you at all. It was a BOGO with my leather backpack.
What I wanted back then was a big face without being gaudy. Or maybe just a bit gaudy. A dazzling dial. Diamonds, even. Never a bust down, I always knew better than that. Beyond that I had exactly one aspiration and it belonged to James Bond.
A friend and I were obsessed with the Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean from Quantum of Solace. Not admired. Obsessed. We made a pact to buy them together one day, as all heterosexual, non-codependent best friends do.
He’s a former friend now. I’ll leave the why of that where it lies.
I don’t know if he ever bought his.
I know I didn’t. Not then. Years later I sat with one in my basket and closed the tab. What I bought instead is where the next part of this starts.
What I bought in between was another Apple Watch.
Ironic, no? The “fake watch.” The perennial pretender. The soulless slab that had the whole industry clutching its pearls.
I’ll defend it, and I’ve got some standing to. I sold a metric f-ton of them at Apple, and I got a VIP try-on of the original Edition in Gold back in Chicago when that still felt like an occasion. Two things can be true at once. It’s a cool device.
It isn’t a watch.
It is, though, an exercise (a failing one) in the exact stuff we love about the real ones. Quick-release straps you swap by mood and outfit. Premium case materials that can be chosen rather than accepted. Something on your wrist that’s meant to say who you are. Strip the screen out and that’s what all collectors argue about.
There was an afternoon on the shop floor, five of us stood near the Genius Bar, where we got into it properly.
My boss at the time did the maths out loud. I always want to add more to his title, than “boss.” He’s more like family to me and a lot of the guys…But I digress. On watches, he was the one holding the calculator that day. His thoughts aloud amounted to: three special Apple Watches. Somewhere around $5,400 all in. For that money he could have had the Seamaster from the latest Bond film on his wrist for the rest of his life, and left it to somebody afterwards. Top-spec Hermès Apple Watch was about $1,250 at the time, so the sum held up. I looked down at the loud lime Hermès strap on my watch…
The Rolex wearer agreed. More of an uncle to me, that one.
The other two came back swinging. Dinosaur watches for show-offs, they said, against real technology that’s out there saving lives.
They weren’t wrong. But, they missed the entire point.
They weren’t wrong about themselves, which took me a good deal longer to work out. They were ecosystem men, top to bottom, and for them it was the correct purchase made for the correct reason. I still drink the Kool-Aid happily, just don’t spill it on my personal watch.
Motive is what matters. It’s the only thing that does.
That conversation is the one I kept coming back to, because it made me ask what I was actually doing. What I was spending on…
Why was I so attached to having data on my wrist, when the thing I’d wanted since that pact was craftsmanship? To be like Bond…
To be the sort of gent who owns one good thing instead of three life-optimising, clever ones.
I’d love to tell you I settled it that afternoon.
I’m writing this over bacon and French toast at The Angel Hotel, admiring my gold Whoop 5.0 MG. For a watch lover, a screen-less abomination that doesn’t tell the time at all. I adore the bloody thing.
So, not settled. But that’s the afternoon that I started asking better questions. Part 2 is where I got some of the answers. And taste is where Part 2 begins.
Part Two is where I got some of the answers: How I Got Into Watches (Part Two).
Cheers.