Reply With QuoteMine was a Citizen Promaster, bought from the first money I've ever earned when I was a teenager....
Breitling Chronomat 1997..... with UTC
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Mine was a Citizen Promaster, bought from the first money I've ever earned when I was a teenager....
In a sense, the watch that started it all for me was the watch my Dad gave me in 1978 or so. It was one he'd worn himself on and off for a few years, a slightly second-hand looking, inexpensive handwound with a gold-coloured case.
I'm sorry to say that I can't even remember what make it was. I wore it until 1984 when it was broken in an accident and discarded. I never thought if it as more than an ordinary watch and I'd never have taken photos of it and posted them on an Internet forum if that had even been possible. But it was "my watch", and I had a bond with it that I've never had with any watch since.
It was the search for a watch to replace this one that gave me my obsession with wristwatches. Wristwatches became a new-found interest as I pored over the displays in jewellers' windows, looking for my next watch, in the summer of 1984. Eventually I found the watch pictured below, a Rotary Sea Captain, on sale for £40, reduced from £79. I really wanted the white dial version from the jeweller's further along the street, but that was full price.
A £79 watch seemed like a luxury item to me then. I loved the screw-down crown at 4 o'clock - more watches should have those - and it was my first quartz watch. That seemed like a highly desirable feature then, as well.
So the Rotary became my new watch and my search was over. But unfortunately the damage had been done. Poring over watches in jeweller's shops had just been too absorbing, too compelling. Within weeks I was looking for a second watch. The idea of having more than one watch seemed a little unusual to me at the time, but I'd got the bug. In the following year or two I bought all kinds of watches - nothing very expensive - a Swatches, a Casio, a relatively inexpensive Seiko or two, a solar powered Pulsar.
But matters came to a climax, or so I hoped, when I inherited some money in 1986. On my birthday that year I caught the train to Newcastle, looked round a few jewellers and bought my Rolex GMT Master.
This, I hoped, would finally cure me of my habit of buying watches. Why would you buy a Seiko or a Citizen or an Accurist when you've got a Rolex? I pondered, rhetorically. But I was wrong. I kept buying ordinary watches, and in 1994 I bought a second Rolex. Since then I've continued to buy all kinds of watches, although I've been much more restrained this last ten years or so.
But none of my watches has ever given me that "my watch" bond the way my old cheap handwound passed down from my dad did. Simply because I've always had other watches, as well.
I envy people who only have one watch. My wife would undoubtedly think that was very funny. But I have at least four watches that I could never part with so I'll never have only one watch again, provided they aren't stolen or destroyed in a fire.
Last edited by monogroover; 16th August 2013 at 10:01.
Growing up in the seventies, my hero was the Roger Moore James Bond, and ever since seeing the Submariner on his wrist in the 1973 Live & Let Die, I was in love with sports watches.
The first good watch I had was a Seiko Chronograph in 2000 (which still turns heads today). Since then, an Omega Seamaster James Bond Limited Edition black dial with a small discreet "007" on the seconds hand in 2008 when Quantum Of Solace was released. And in 2010, an Omega Speedmaster which is my daily wear watch and a Rolex Submariner Ceramic Bezel. So 37 years later, my dream came true!
Is that the end? Hell No!
I always had a watch of some sort from aged 6 or 7, unlike my two brothers who couldn't stand wearing them and to this day still don't. I got the bug from my father who always had a Rolex, Seiko or an Omega on his wrist. He got the bug from his dad who always had a big heavy old gold Rolex that used to spin round his wrist as he got older He was a real life Arthur Daily, owned garages, traded motors and was a proper old school geezer smoking cigars and spending his afternoons/evenings playing poker and drinking the hard stuff - the watch suited him!).
For Me it was one of those plastic watches out of those bubble gum machines the build quality was amazing but the hands were stuck in one position in fact i still wear it when flying the B-777.
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