How Bobo The Clown Got Into Watches

It’s A-Level English class and my friend next to me has a cool looking watch. He tells me it’s a Seiko SKX007. I nod politely and immediately forget the reference number. Before he goes too in depth about its mechanical nature, I ask how much it is. His reply: ‘about £200’. I did some quick maths and converted this into the only currency that mattered as an 18-year-old, realising, with horror, that the watch had cost him 57 pints of Guinness. I looked at the underside of my wrist to see my £15 dive style Casio (I had decided after seeing John Wick that this was the coolest way to wear a watch, regardless of bulk) and chuckled to myself. This boy was insane! What maniac spends hundreds on obsolete technology when something under £20 tells the time better?

Photo by ERIC ZHU

 

Well, me. Bobo the clown.

It did take me a while to catch on though. A couple of years had passed from this moment and I was in my second year of University, listening to a lecture on Britain’s colonial history. Besides me on the desk was a new watch. I had since downgraded from the Casio to one of Amazon’s cheap Chinese offerings, a SONGDU chronograph. Why wasn’t it on my wrist, you ask? The bracelet kept ripping my arm hairs out. More importantly, though, this was the class that changed the way I thought about timepieces (and a lot of other things too). The lecturer, finishing up his class, started talking about the Longitude Act.

For those that don’t know, after the Sicily naval disaster of 1707 claimed 2,000 sailors, the British Government passed the aforementioned act in order to solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. It’s then at this point when English clockmaker and horological badass John Harrison walks in and says something like: ‘Oi! Right honorable geezers, here’s a Marine Chronometer’ effectively solving the longitude problem. (It was actually more complicated than this so if you’re interested give it a google).

The lecturer explained that the point in bringing this up was to argue that this technological advancement would have indirectly aided the British Empire’s slave trade and global colonial reach. It became apparent then, that the clocks on our walls and watches on our wrists were capsules of history; the amalgamation of thousands of years of science and technological development that, like most tools, weren’t always beneficial for everyone. I was blown away. The little circle on my wrist was suddenly a chasm of unknown historical progress – only it wasn’t on my wrist. And its ‘history’ probably didn’t extend much further back than a sweatshop factory.

Scottish Watches and Bark and Jack

My newfound appreciation, however, didn’t extend to mechanical watches just yet, as my next purchase at the start of the coming summer was a Citizen eco-drive BM8180-03E. It’s a modest but nifty little thing and I still thought I was hot shit for not having spent hundreds on a mechanical. But as I enjoyed my little Citizen and researched it online, my YouTube recommendations turned into a rabbit hole. A very, very, deep rabbit hole. It didn’t take long before a sweeping second hand was ‘a thing of beauty’ and my vocabulary was filling with words that I didn’t fully understand: Magic Levers are cool – whatever they do, so are silicon hairsprings – or was it mainspring? Wait, there are two springs? I became a snob about In-house vs. ETA movements before I even owned a mechanical watch. I was getting ahead of myself. I could see the pool below me and it was exciting, but I still hadn’t jumped.

By the end of the summer, with money saved up from my part time job, I made the plunge. I became the owner of a Seiko SARB033, and fell in love with it: the applied markers and logo, the sowing needle seconds hand, the thoughtful date window, the font of ‘Automatic’ and of course the exhibition case back – staring at the industrial looking but no less pleasing 6R15. I was enamored. And despite it losing an annoying amount of time, after a year of wear I still feel the same way.

I’m currently keeping it as a one-watch ‘collection’ – but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to own a Black Bay 36 in the near future (I guess I got over the whole in-house thing). Plus, since becoming an enthusiast and arguing with my mum about why Apple watches aren’t watches, I’ve found out about my grandfather’s Rolex Oyster Royal and Omega Genève – as well as that my dad might (?) have a quartz Seamaster (!!) ‘somewhere’ (??) in the loft (!?!?!).

It’s taken a while to see that watches and enthusiasm for them isn’t just a load of pretentious nonsense (granted, a lot of it still is). But wearing a mechanical watch is beyond everything else, fun – I enjoy testing the accuracy, researching about the history, admiring the craftmanship but most of all, taking an unnecessary amount of wrist shots for Instagram.

I think that, for me, this hobby is about buying into the idea of an anachronism that refuses to be truly obsolete, something functional that could continue being functional well beyond my own lifespan. There’s obviously the appeal of the history already loaded into these machines, but there’s also the appeal of the individual history you imbue it. I like the idea of my watch one-day becoming ‘dad’s old watch’ then ‘grandad’s very old watch’ and so on. Watches, and particularly mechanical ones, can be so much more than just watches.

Then again, they do only tell the time.

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