The simple old watch making me face time, age and what comes next – Joe Bennett

Joe Bennett says he chose his watch for its simplicity; it tells the time and nothing else. Photo / 123rf

Bernard Levin, the writer, wore the same watch for most of his adult life. When it finally stopped and proved irreparable he had a glass display case made for it, inscribed with the legend, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant”.

Some years ago my own watch died. I also had it for years and I wrote a column about it, a threnody, a song of lamentation and farewell. I compared it to losing a friend. I said I had barely the heart to replace it.

When the piece was published I received an email from John the Jeweller who offered, if I was interested, to fit a new mechanism into the old case. Oh yes, I said, yes please, and took the watch to him and he did as he promised, and he would take no payment. The watch goes still, is on my wrist as I type this. John the Jeweller is a good man. If he has enemies, may they get urinary tract infections.

I bought the watch in 1988 from a little shop in High St, Christchurch. I chose it for its simplicity. The watch is not submersible to 50 fathoms. It will not tell me the time in New York, or the number of calories I have expended. It does not have a rotating bezel. It has 12 legible numbers, plain hands and a plain face. It tells the time, here, now, in my life and nothing else.

And time has told on it. The case was once bright silver but is now dull bronze. It looks its age and we should all look our age. It is like smoothed driftwood, or a pair of jeans so worn that they fit like a second skin. You cannot fake the true effects of time.

Over the years, perhaps half a dozen different straps have held it to my wrist at the point where I can feel my pulse. And for 37 years, which is more than half my life, the second hand has jutted 60 times a minute, more or less in keeping with that resting pulse. The watch has flown around the world with me. It’s been up and down this country. It’s seen me type several million words and kept me to countless deadlines.

I feel undressed without it. It is the last thing I take off at night, the first thing I put on in the morning. In the intervening hours it lies on the bedside table, doing its job in silence, inexorable and measured. If my house caught fire in the night I’d grab the watch as I fled. It has become a part of my waking self, a heart on the wrist.

I have never lusted after other watches. I would not swap it for the most expensive Rolex. I’ve heard it said that a posh watch says something about its owner. I think it does, but not what he wants it to.

This week I bought my watch a new battery for $35, which is more than the whole watch cost in 1988. The battery came with a card that guarantees it will last at least two years, which is clever marketing. It reassures the buyer that he’s bought well. At the same time, should the battery not last that long, there isn’t one watch owner in a hundred who will remember and who will have kept the card.

As I drove home with the watch back on my wrist, I reflected, with a slight jolt, that in two years I will be 70.

Now I realise there will be people reading this to whom a 70-year-old seems a babe in arms.

But I am not those people and I have never been 70 before.

Of course, every milestone age seems improbable at the time – I remember thinking 30 was pretty well the end of things – but 70 is special. It was Moses who pointed out: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

Our element is time, a watch is the measure of it, and a long time spent together renders anything precious. Bernard Levin did the proper thing. Happy new year.