I have set this blog up as a place for me to share my views and thoughts on watches.

Since early childhood I have had a fascination with timepieces. From an incredibly slim calculator watch I bought during a trip to Germany in my early teens to an ancient, mechanical Timex watch I discovered stored in an old tobacco tin in the back of my grandparents bureau in Shetland a couple of years later. Watches have always been a part of my life.

The calculator watch broke after just a few weeks after I bought it. Seeing my distress, my parents helped me to pack it up and send it back to Germany for a replacement. I was almost as excited when the replacement arrived but but it only lasted a few months. The brand escapes me but it definitely didn’t have the build quality of the Casio G-Shocks of today.

The Timex taught me a slightly different lesson. My grandparents lived in a turn-of-the-century, two-story house where every cupboard and drawer was jam-packed with tins rattling with potential treasures, plastic bags wrapped with rubber bands to secure and hide their contents. Everything appeared to be there to be rummaged through, explored and unwrapped secretly when nobody was around.

And so it was that I discovered the battered old tobacco tin way at the back of the bureau, crammed in to the side of old magazines and covered with bags full of balls of wool – my grandmother was a seamstress and keen knitter.

I checked that nobody was around and crept upstairs into one of the bedrooms carrying the tobacco tin carefully with me. Opening the box, I discovered a kitchen towel folded inside. I excitedly lifted it out and set it on top of the tin lid. Then slowly unfolded it.

Inside was an old Timex watch – no strap, the white dial visible through the scratched, domed glass. Turning it over in my hand, revealed a case scratched and marked with age. I immediately tried to wind it, preparing to turn the crown clockwise and then a short counter-clockwise turn to be safe. But as soon as I tried to turn it, the crown jammed.

In hindsight the right thing to do was pack the watch back into the kitchen towel, put it into the tin and return it to the empty space in the bureau. But my growing curiosity about watches already included a fascination with how they worked. I had already found a working mechanical Favre Leuba in a drawer in my grandparents bedroom which worked perfectly. The sound created when it was wound up and the lovely, smooth ticking of the sweeping second hand enchanted me.

I had also worked out by that point that it was safe to remove the back of a mechanical watch without damaging it and doing so revealed the tiny, intricately engineered components hard at work keeping time.

With my curiosity about why the Timex was not winding piqued, I turned it over and, using my thumbnail, began to prise the rear of the case off. There was very little movement at first and I had to move my thumb around to get good leverage. But slowly it began to lift.

And then suddenly an explosion of tiny parts – minuscule cogs and wheels, microscopic springs and screws. Flying up into the air momentarily before falling down to litter the carpet around the box. And me crouched over the box – wide-eyed and jaw agape in shock.

And then the reactions kicked in, fuelled by the fear of having done something wrong and the risk of getting caught. I hurriedly gathered up every single part, scouring the thick carpet for every last piece. I carefully placed some of the loose parts back into the watch case and carefully placed the rear of the case back on but didn’t snap it shut for fear of damaging a part. The remaining springs and cogs were placed around the watch case which was folded back up in the kitchen towel and placed in the tin.

I hid the tin under my bed that night as there was always somebody in the room with the bureau. But the next morning I was up early to sneak the tobacco tin back into its space, placing the bags of wool over it once more and closing the bureau door.

Nothing was said during the rest of my stay and I didn’t stray near the bureau again for a long time. But I have a hazy memory of a return trip and my grandfather asking if I knew anything about an old watch in a tobacco tin. In a cowardly move, I played dumb. shrugged my shoulders and shook my head.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J.R.R. Tolkien