Flotsam and Jetsam

“…or my watch has stopped”.

Groucho Marx

Back in the day – whenever that was – I would hazard a guess that more folk wore wristwatches than did not. I certainly did and as someone who spent a life in a timetable-centred environment (education in my case) these handy devices were/are a godsend. When being late is not an option knowing the time is essential.

I was at school myself back in the days of the cheap mechanical watch (and expensive ones too, of course, though not for the likes of me) and it will come as no surprise that my first watch was just such – by Timex as I recall. The quartz motion did not really make an appearance on wrists until the mid to late 1970s, followed a while later by the first digital watches. The big change  – which resulted in a dramatic reduction of watch wearing – came rather later, in the early 2000s. The ubiquity of mobile devices – whence most young folk now glean their consciousness of the passing of the hours (if they do at all!) – has rendered the humble wristwatch obsolete as far as most are concerned.

Not – naturally – to me. I am uncomfortable if I don’t have a watch on my wrist and I find myself looking down at said appendage rather more frequently than I am usually aware of. Also – I am an old-fashioned kind of a guy and hold no truck with such new-fangled fancies as quartz or digital watches. I do make an exception for the automatic winding mechanism, which evolved during the early part of the last century, but that’s as far as I go.

As it happens, I don’t really care for sports watches either  – so my chosen timepiece tends to be an everyday or dress watch; analogue in every sense – though it can make use of my motion to wind itself.

This watch will be familiar to those who know me – the very lovely Omega Seamaster that The Girl bought me the year we got married. She would have liked to have found me a watch fashioned during the year of my birth, but that proved too difficult – and 1966 was a good year in many ways for us Brits so it does have a good resonance.

The post linked above does chronicle – however – the problem with the routine wearing of such a lovely timepiece. The Seamaster runs splendidly – until it doesn’t… and when it stops it does so expensively. In part that is due to the difficulty of finding a watch repairer who can service and fix vintage watches and the availability of any parts required. If you reread the post you will see that the watch was repaired in 2021. Sadly it stopped again last year and awaits further attention.

Whenever the Seamaster has been ‘hors de combat’ I have reverted to the first real watch that I purchased (back in the early 1980s) – the Oris Big Crown pilot’s watch. Unlike the Seamaster these watches are not really collectors items, but they were well made and this one has given me forty years of really good and reliable service…

…until recently!

To be fair – the Oris has not stopped. If I leave it sitting on the dining room table it will quite happily run accurately and well. If I put it on my wrist – however – it will pause randomly during the day for variable periods. I suspect the automatic mechanism needs some attention, but these watches are harder than the Omega when it comes to find a willing repairer to take a look.

Of course – an unreliable timepiece is no good at all if one’s day is ruled by deadlines. As a result I have found myself obliged to purchase a new watch – for the first time since the early 80s.

…and here it is. This is a Seiko Presage ‘Zen Garden’. Not everybody’s choice, but a good solid automatic analogue watch with a better than average movement. My requirements in making that choice were that it must look pretty and give me another forty years of reliable service – the which should certainly see me out!