Watching your store of time shrinking away

My watch died. Or rather it began to go wrong, which with a watch is the same thing. Indeed, a wrong watch is worse than a dead one.

It was never much of a watch. I bought it for $30 from a poky jeweller’s in High Street.

It came with instructions that I didn’t need and a guarantee that I didn’t keep.

I chose it for its simplicity: no second hand because no one needs a second hand; no date because after the first month the date is always wrong (and to put it right you need to know the date); large numerals in conventional script; hands as plain as ice block sticks. And that was that: a watch. I fed it a new battery from time to time and it went for 20 years. My father’s went for 40. It was the only watch of his life, a pre-war beast, whose hands and numerals were painted with luminous phosphorus, the sort that would send a Geiger counter into a carcinogenic tizzy.

Not that that would have worried my father. He loathed fuss.

A watch back then was a significant adult possession, too costly and delicate to be bestowed on mere children.

And it still bore some of its original wonder as an invention.

The world divides time into days and years, but we have always wanted more control over it than that, have felt the need to chop it up and measure it and own it. Hence the ancient invention of the clock, a device so astonishing that everyone wanted one of their own.

And eventually they got one, a miniature one, a clock for the wrist.

They called it a watch because it was always awake. At any moment you could glance at it and watch your store of minutes shrinking.

My father’s watch was as mechanical as an old church clock, a Lilliputian engine driven by a coiled spring like a pubic hair.

Its intricacy was encased in metal and glass for its own protection.

It had to be wound every day, cleaned every year, shielded from water or violence.

And back then every high street had a watch mender, a man with a magnifying lens screwed into one eye socket and a drawer of elfin tools.

I can remember the day all that began to end. It was 1971 and I was in the fourth form and a boy called Marchini came to school with a new watch.

Marchini was not popular but the watch drew a crowd. It was electronic and it was digital.

You had to press a button for the digits to light up and they were barely legible in sunlight, but if you shaded the thing with your hand and squinted there was no mistaking the writing on the wall.

The comprehensibly mechanical was being replaced by the incomprehensibly electronic. Here was the birth of the the 21st century.

Fast forward 10 years and you could get a free watch with five gallons of petrol and it kept better time than your old one.

The high street watch menders melted into nothingness in half a generation.

They called it a watch because it was always awake.

Watch-making continued in Switzerland, but the Swiss could no longer sell their watches as time-keepers because they kept worse time than the quartz ones that cost pennies.

So they plugged them as symbols of status, as ego-props for vain men. Putin collects them. I bet Trump’s got dozens.

The Swiss watch is supposed to say you’ve made it. But if you need a watch to say you’ve made it you’ve made nothing but a fool of yourself.

For the rest of us the quartz watch is a cheap and serviceable wonder. Twenty years wore the gilt off mine, exposing the base yellow metal beneath.

I liked it the better for that, and for the chips and scratches on the glass. They testified to the passage of time, to the happenstance of a life, to the blows of the random. You can’t fake that. I wore the watch happy and I wore it sad. It counted down a third of my life, ticked me from prime to sub prime, before, like me, it began to falter.

My watch began as one of millions but time rendered it unique.

When Bernard Levin’s watch died he had a case made for it, with a plaque beneath. ‘‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant,’’ said the plaque.

I will not go so far. But I cannot bring myself to throw the thing out.

I’ve put it in a drawer by my bed.

When you’ve lived with something for that much time it takes more time still to part from it.