Wednesday 13 November 2019

Generational time keeping

When I was a kid, getting your first watch in late primary school was a rite of passage. I got mine in grade 4 or 5 when my parents had been somewhere in Asia and bought me a pale pink and white one. I was so proud.

Later, in high school, Mum gave me a watch with a slim black leather strap, a gold rim, and a white face with the numbers written in French in a black script font. It's really quite classic and I still have that one somewhere. I don't wear it as it needs to be wound and ain't no one got brain-space to remember to do that!!

These days, fewer kids wear a watch at all. George had quite the collection but in truth, they were more of an 'accessory' to a look than serving a function. I don't recall the girls ever wearing a watch. I could be wrong, but if they did, it was brief.

Even today, they just use their phone or laptop and insist there's no need for one.

Gone too, is the thrill of changing your analogue clock or watch for the start or end daylight saving, trying to remember if it's forwards or backwards and the inevitable colleagues who fronted up to work at the wrong time because they forgot or got it wrong. Now it just happens automatically - even if you move time zones.



Cleaning out a drawer the other day, I stumbled across the watch my grandmother left me. Probably from around the 1920s, it's sweet but so impractical. There'd be no 'quick glance' to see the time on this! It's elegant but tiny!! Maybe people were smaller back then?




Compare that to my watch! I've had two of these. The first for probably five years before the gold wore off and some of the 'diamonds' had fallen out. I also took a big chip out of the glass when I fell off my bike. So I waited for the January sales and just bought another one.

Other than being about 10 times bigger than my grandmother's watch, it also has a much shorter life span. I know some people invest in a proper, 'for life' watch, but I tend to just go with fashion. I can't even guess at how many I've owned.


Anyway, the next generation will be making up for my disposable extravagance by owning no watch at all!

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