Artefacts – Being Analogue
As I have explored many times before on this blog, I am, in my soul, an analogue man. This is despite all the bits of tech I surround myself with and my de facto status as workplace ‘tech guy’ (all down to extensive Google-fu and a willingness to clumsily attack software until it submits). I’m not a Luddite, but I do still rip CDs and manually upload music to my phone because Spotify confuses me, and I only do that because all my cassette tapes are of the Goon Show and my record player weighs a ton and has no headphone jack. I know how to be modern, I just can’t be bothered.
And as I have likewise explained before, this trait is very much inherited, from my father and very much from his late father before him; Men With Many Sheds and the accompanying contents. I haven’t quite gotten all the practical aspects of this tendency yet: the pots of paint in the corner are tiny and intended for little plastic soldiers instead of walls, and the only spanner I own is in fact a novelty Hot Wheels car. In my defence, a) the car also has an Allen socket and b) I do now also own screwdrivers, so I’m getting there.
(This is in much better condition than mine, but look at the practicality!)Where am I going with this, I hear you cry (and not for the first time)? Analogue is the key word from the above. I have never had truck with the modern smartwatch, nor with telling the time on a phone, and apart from one I had briefly as a kid not even with digital watches. To paraphrase Michael J. Caboose, “time is not a line, it’s a circle – that’s why clocks are round.” And so I stick to proper watches. Most of the time I wear a hefty TW Steel piece, which is scaled to look normal on big people with big wrists. As a small man with small wrists, this just means that I could tell the time from fifty feet if only my arms were that long.
For special occasions – my own wedding, for example – my antique pocketwatch comes out. They have to be special and also non-summer occasions because a pocketwatch demands a waistcoat; the one I bought for my wedding is the most expensive pocket I’ve ever owned. It always feels very satisfying to pull out such a heavy weight of clockwork, and it always takes me half an hour to wind the thing because I can’t resist just watching all those delicate cogs work their magic. How I never went full steampunk in my youth is a mystery to me sometimes.
But for really special occasions only one timepiece will do. Something slimline enough to work with a suit but carrying a gravitas that even a pocketwatch can’t provide. Something truly unique, a real statement of style. I am of course talking about the novelty penguin watch my grandfather gave me twenty years ago.
Yes, the penguin is the second hand. Yes, it dives in and out of the water every minute, a merry little soul living his best life. Yes, the strap is on the wrong way round, and I cannot for the life of me remember if I attached it wrong or if Granddad always had it that way; either is entirely possible. The penguin is a clear disc of plastic, the holes in the ice are printed on the back of the glass so it can dive ‘through’ them without breaking the illusion. I arbitrarily decided that the tip of the penguin’s beak is the ‘hand’, though this is moot as there are no numbers on the face for it to point to. It is a very stupid watch and I love it dearly.
It is also, possibly, a very high-quality novelty penguin watch; while I have had no luck tracing its exact provenance, Beuchat are a long-established Swiss manufacturer of expensive diving watches. They seem to have made a similar watch with a diving dolphin (but it doesn’t have the ice overlay so it’s not as good as mine). Maybe this was some sort of novelty piece – the penguin is diving, after all. Where Granddad got it from is a complete mystery, just like half the stuff he owned. This is a man who kept a plastic bag full of Indian gemstones and Roman coins in the back of a cupboard, between the bulk box of pink water pistols and one of his dozen lawnmowers, and never told any of us. Never mind the Tower of London – stick the Crown Jewels in one of his sheds and they’d never be found.
The penguin watch is old, and silly, and impractical. It makes me smile every time I wear it. It makes me think of my mad old Granddad. He’d laugh, if I could read him this, if he could see me still wearing that watch. And then he’d go to the shed and come back with the Ark of the Covenant in a cardboard box, but only because he’d padded it out with some old instruction manuals he needed.
