The Piccadilly station clock signals 5 minutes before rush-hour...
Looking around shops and online made me think of the many watches I have had over the years. In fact it led me to waste time, a happy hour reminiscing on all those watches which had adorned my left wrist over the decades.
I want something stylish and practical which is easy on the eye and also easy to tell the time at a glance. A watch that is elegant enough to see me through meetings I have around college and the north-west in general but which will also inform me of the Cinderella hour when I am living it up at a gig or bar in the Northern Quarter.
I searched in department stores and on Deansgate, in the jewellry shops of King Street and even ventured into the Arndale Centre, but all to no avail. Exasperated, over a coffee in North Tea Power a friend mentioned that John Lewis sell watches. I’d forgotten about John Lewis- as it’s not in the city centre but out in the furthest of Manchester’s southern suburbs in Cheadle Hulme.
So it looks like a watch with a “glitz” in the title may soon be joining a select band of time pieces that I have owned. I fondly remember the orange face of my very first watch as a teenager and the fact that it supposedly could be worn underwater. I never did put that to the test. I then succumbed to the 1980s digital watch craze, with a couple of watches which I am sure were en vogue at the time.
But my strongest memory of purchasing a watch came in Malaysia in the 1990s. Having walked to the top of a hill on Penang in humid conditions, we came across a local lad with a tray full of watches. His sales pitch won me over: “Genuine imitation watches” he cried. Top marks for honesty, kind of. It was the only time I've ever bought a genuine imitation watch; I fell for the novelty value of its Chinese numerals and it lasted me for years.
