The hands on my watch have been around the world

DURING my last visit to Canada a cat stole my watch, so I popped down to the local supermarket and bought myself a new, very cheap watch. It cost eight Canadian dollars. I looked at the back of the watch and saw it was truly international. The inscription says the stainless steel back was made in China, but the internal parts came from Japan. The whole lot was assembled in Singapore. That watch has been to almost as many places as I have. The strap was probably made from the hide of a Patagonian llama. Well, maybe not.

When I was growing up, we had very definite ideas about which countries made the best stuff. We knew, for example, that anything stamped “Made in England” was sure to be good quality. The Japanese, we knew, made cheap copies of other countries’ goods.

At boarding school I bought a Parker fountain pen with my pocket money. Obviously it was not a real Parker. If you looked carefully you could see the trademark said “P*rker”, and it leaked ink all over my shirts. That’s what Japanese things did.

Later, we learnt that Japan was actually making high-quality stuff and it was now China that produced the cheap imitations. England dropped out of the high-quality manufacturing business before that.

I once wanted to buy an exhaust pipe for my Japanese motorcycle, but found it too expensive. The salesman pointed to some similar exhaust pipes and said in a rather deprecating way: “Well, we do have these for about half the price of the genuine Japanese parts, but they’re made in England, so they probably won’t last.” How things had changed.

When we had recovered from the bitterness of World War II, we realised Germany was the place to go for precision engineered products.

Today, many of the state-of-the-art BMW motorcycles have engines that are made in Austria and the traditional two-stroke Vespa scooters (such iconic symbols of Italy) now come from India, where they also manufacture Royal Enfield motorbikes.

My very proudly American Apple computer has the tiny words: “Made in China” on the base.

I think the point of modern manufacturing is that hardly anybody makes complete items anymore. We might believe that Peugeot and Citroën are French and that Volkswagen is German, but if we look under the bonnet we’re likely to find Chinese electronic components and the rubber hoses were made in Indonesia, while the gearboxes were churned out in India.

The world has become one big factory. I suppose that’s what globalization really means.

Last Laugh

John was driving in a new sports car when he stopped to chat to his friend Pete. “Hey,” said Pete. “Where did you get the new car?” “I won a lottery,” said John. “For three nights in a row, I dreamed of the number seven and I reckoned, well three times seven is 24, so I backed number 24 and it came up the winner.”

“But John,” said Pete. “Three times seven is not 24, it’s 21.”

“Who cares?” replied John. “Twenty-four won anyway.”