My brand new wristwatch

Don’t you agree my new wristwatch is an exquisitely beautiful timepiece? (Btw it’s not as big as the camera close up suggests.)

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  My new wristwatch

In 1961 Chairman Mao (no less) assigned the Tianjin Watch factory to make the first Chinese aviation watch (chronograph) for the Air Force of the People’s Liberation Army………… and I now own a 2021 reissue which cost rather a lot of money 😦 .

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  Turn over and the watch back reveals a window of beauty!

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The face of my 1963 sea-gull is pure, purposeful and surprisingly elegant for a military watch, with a slightly antique pearl dial giving it a vintage feel, even reminds me of the watch my Grandfather used to wear………. Ahh but today we all own (wear?) Smartphones so I’m wondering will mechanical timepieces, with a linage traced back to John Harrison’s naval chronometer in the 1700’s and invented to solve the problem of calculating longitude while at sea, will mechanical clocks and wristwatches be consigned to history, only to be found in Dickens novels like Miss Havisham’s doomed attempt at freezing a memory in time.

Here’s a thought, when was the last time you saw a teenage girl without a Smartphone physically attached to her hand, never?

Call this a birthday present to myself, an indulgence I feel slightly guilty about purchasing in an economic pandemic, but at my old age of 55 I’ve bought myself what I’d describe my first expensive watch, and if you didn’t know lol, adorned around my wrist is the iconic 1963 Chinese Pilots chronograph. Now gaze at the obverse watch-back draped across my wrist and you’ll see this is no battery powered quartz adornment, no not even a self winding automatic movement, this mechanical instrument is a wound spring, gear driven timepiece with many working parts and a delicate balance wheel that beats as the watches heart.

It quite literally does and quite hypnotic to err watch lol.

Hold the sea-gull movement to my ear and and the metallic beat reminds me of a ticking time bomb in a James Bond movie, that’s before 007 cuts the wires so saving mankind yet again!

My watch story begins months ago after tiring of gazing at my £7 Casio wristwatch day after day after……… One of several exact copies I’ve owned this past 25 years, black plastic cased quartz timepieces that keep impeccable time yet feel soulless cheap and manufactured (because they are), oh and seldom removed from my wrist even when I’m in bed with a woman jeeze they could tell some stories if they could. But I’ve grown bored of my Casio and ‘kind of on a whim‘ treated myself to an aviation chronograph, with its dazzling sapphire crystal the hardest glass known to man….. I love it.

Yes accurate and reliable at the moment, but we’ll see if the power spring and many moving parts keeps it that way in years to come.

Hmm, I’m not so sure.

A. Shepherdson 2021