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April 5, 2005


A question of time and money ...

ABOUT an inch-and-a-bit in diameter, it spends most of its life hanging from an old needle on a pin board. It is scratched, part of it doesn’t work, and when it’s not on the needle, I’m frustratedly running around, ready to go out, looking for it.

It was scratched within hours of being bought. It’s had a new strap, which cost more than the entire original, but if – when – it stops working completely, or I lose it, whichever comes first, I will shed no tears.

Wearing £1,000’s worth of watch on my wrist would be different altogether.

I would be neurotic about losing it, about scratching it or about its ostentation making me a potential victim for violence or theft. I have never accepted the ‘value’ of a bit of rock, or paying over the odds for a portable timepiece, so finding a 12-page supplement dedicated to ‘Watches & Jewellery’ in today’s Saturday Financial Times came as a surprise.

The Watches & Jewellery supplement in the Financial Times of April 2, 2005.

An hour is an hour and a second a second whether they are marked on a watch that has cost a fiver or £2,000. Even a watch that has stopped is right twice a day.

The FT’s marketing department deserves great acclaim. The Saturday FT has long intrigued me with the juxtaposition of its weekly magazine, edited by John Lloyd, which addresses significant social phenomena seriously, and at length, with the fortnightly or monthly How to Spend It supplement.

Adding an extra 12 broadsheet pages to the paper on such a small topic is an impressive tribute to the FT’s advertising sales staff, not least because they have persuaded upmarket trinket makers to splash out twice on the same products.

Five writers have been credited with between, at a guess, 12,000 and 15,000 words – covering topics from investment collecting to the watch trade deficit between the United States and Switzerland.

Manufacturing and marketing watches and jewellery may provide employment, but even taking such social concerns into account, justifying more than about a fiver when my current watch comes to the end of its life will be impossible.

I’ve been thinking of replacing it, of course, especially since the second hand stopped working, but with working less in broadcasting than I used to, I can’t say that I have missed it.

Indeed, while punctuality is important to me, being within a minute or two each side of an appointed time is accuracy that only those living in the provinces can achieve in big cities.

Brands do talk; of course they do, usually shouting loudly about those who have more money than sense.

Those who can run their days by responding to the pangs of hunger that indicate lunch, tea or dinner times or by looking upwards to see where – roughly – the sun is in the sky probably have lives which are more luxurious and happier.

I just hope that those in the FT’s ad sales unit aren’t getting too stressed, looking at their watches, waiting for commission bonuses, that really would be a waste of time – and money.