Coping Mechanism
Watches and mushroom oil and dead grandparents
Below is an essay about watches I wrote for issue 26 of Apartamento Magazine, which came out in print towards the end of 2020. It ran over 10 pages and was beautifully illustrated by Oscar Gronner.
Shortly after writing this I bought a pretty nice watch - a Tudor Black Bay 58. It scratched the itch perfectly, and I’ve never really thought about watches since.
I love Apartamento and am proud to have been (occasionally) contributing to the magazine since 2011. Print really is so much cooler. I’ve included a picture of one of the pages from the original story below, but it really is worth checking it out if you come across a copy in your travels.
Coping mechanism
James Ross-Edwards
I never aspired to be a watch guy.
I mean, I had watches as a kid—a tiny Seiko my grandfather gave me for learning the time, then a Rip Curl diver-inspired watch with a rotating ‘heat bezel’, supposedly a tool for competition surfers. But I gave up the Rip Curl in 2002, after my final high school exam. School was over and so were uniforms, rules, and all other symbols of oppression including time. From then on if I needed to know how late I was to my shift at Belmonte’s Pizza I could find out from my Nokia 3310, the dashboard of my ‘87 Camry, or the digital display on the microwave in my parents’ kitchen as I melted Kraft Singles between crackers for breakfast.
My fashion was evolving at this time, too. Earnest Aussie surf brands of the ‘90s were making way for some embarrassing Ben Harper and Jack Johnson-drenched earthiness. Why wear a watch when you could tie some beads and leather shit to your wrist? Watches also got in the way of all the three-day music festival wristbands you had obviously kept on.
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All this aside, watches were for dads. Younger watch guys were dorks. Real estate agents in shiny suits, ad agency account execs who admired the clients too much. They were the kind of guys who condescendingly called me ‘buddy’ or ‘champion’ or ‘boss’ when I picked up their empty glasses at the city bar I worked at.
And growing up in the ‘90s white, male, middle class, and suburban—all my heroes were Gen-Xers who went to great lengths to prove how little they cared about anything. It was a privileged and unoriginal definition of cool—but at the time I felt proud to see myself as a John Cusack from High Fidelity–type figure in a world full of Rob Lowe’s character from Wayne’s World.
Anyway, 18 years later and I have developed a weird obsession with status timepieces.
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It started around March, when lockdown hit London. Every day I zone out on work Zoom calls, reading articles, scrolling forums, copy and pasting reference numbers into Google. I pause TV shows to study the wrists of characters to work out what they’re wearing. I annoy my wife by wandering into the room and contextlessly regurgitating a fact I’ved just read. My first WhatsApps of the day are screen caps of vintage Rolexes sent to my friend Kym (the only other person who cares). Most disturbingly, I’ve begun having thoughts like ‘£11,000 with box and papers. Not bad!’
To be clear, I’m the worst type of novice. I’ve barely scratched the surface. And I don’t have 11,000 spare in any currency. Also—to completely kill my credibility—my watch collection is literally as small as a collection can be (two).
One is a Mickey Mouse Timex I bought at the Beams store in Tokyo on my honeymoon, last year (well before the obsession took hold). It cost around £60—and I’ve worn it most days since.
My other is a hand-wound Omega dress watch that had previously belonged to my grandfather. I found it in a shoebox in my nan’s garage in Sydney in 2010. The glass was scratched and fogged up, the caseback was loose, and—though the crown made a satisfying clicking noise when you turned it—the hands remained still. But you could still make out the familiar logo and word ‘Omega’ in gold on the patinated dial—a side effect of spending most of its life in the Australian heat. It was a beautiful, simple object.
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Nanny had only a vague recollection of it at the time: it was my grandfather’s and he’d bought it overseas (he’d died in 2004, so couldn’t help). Anyway, she gave it to me there and then. I’d loved Papa, and the idea of having something of his was moving.
My mum took it to a local jeweller who quoted $1,000 to fix it. I didn’t have $1,000, so it sat, broken, alongside my mum’s heirloom jewellery.
In 2013 I relocated to London. In 2014, the day before she was due to leave her flat and move into an aged-care home, Nanny died. In 2015, when I returned home to Sydney for the first time since leaving, I was short a cousin, a family dog, and my last remaining grandparent. Nanny’s flat had been sold, so we helped Mum clear out her garage. The night before flying back to London I packed the watch into my suitcase.
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I took it to the Omega store on Old Bond Street, where, after eventually deciding that I wasn’t homeless, they let me in and offered to send the watch to Switzerland to get assessed.
Six weeks later it returned. Omega couldn’t fix it in- house as they no longer produced the parts for a watch that old. But, based on serial numbers, they confirmed that it was purchased by my grandfather from their boutique in Hong Kong in 1952.
My grandfather, Ross Clark, fought in the Australian Army in the Second World War. When the war ended in 1945 he was conscripted into the British Army and posted to Japan on a peacekeeping mission. After that, he returned to Australia and worked for the Commercial Bank of Australia while attending university in the evenings. After that, the bank posted him to their London headquarters, where he worked for several years while living in a Notting Hill bedsit.
He bought this watch when his ship stopped in Hong Kong en route back to Australia, to marrying my grandmother and creating my family. The serial numbers couldn’t confirm what he paid for the watch that day, or what prompted him to buy it. Nor could they have predicted that one day, on a timeline of Ross Clark’s life, this purchase might seem like a meaningful juncture between two lives. Bachelorhood, independence, and adventure on one side; family, responsibility, and lawn bowls on the other.
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I was grateful to the Swiss and their good sense of record-keeping. And I took the watch to the vintage repairer they referred me to in Mayfair, where a kind man with no social skills plugged my details into a computer running Windows 95 and told me to come back in 20 weeks.
Twenty weeks later I returned, and they handed it over. The scratched glass had been replaced and you could now make out each of the individually polished gold hands and hour markings. The silver case was polished and the back now stayed on without falling off. Most importantly, when you wound it up, the watch now ticked and told you the time.
I thanked the man and paid him the cost of a return flight to Sydney. At 31—the same age Ross Clark was when he wandered into the Omega store on his stopover—I had become a watch guy. Every morning I’d wind it up, strap it to my wrist and go about my business, just like he would have..
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I had assumed I’d be fielding non-stop compliments and questions about my cool, classic, and dignified timepiece so prepared some humble boilerplate responses. But in the whole time I’ve worn it it’s barely been noticed, let alone mentioned. A little disappointing, but I soon realised that the purpose of this object wasn’t external validation.
It’s also super fragile. Within months of fixing it I scratched the glass on a brick wall walking home drunk, then magnetised it walking through the metal detector at the Eurostar terminal. A week after that, I overwound it, snapping the mainspring, which sent be back to Mayfair and emptied my bank account, yet again. Finally, late one night at a friend’s 30th birthday party, I plunged by arm into the tub of melted ice to grab whatever was left. My wrist stopped millimetres short of drowning the watch—and my grandfather’s legacy—permanently.
I retrieved my wrist and took myself to the far end of the garden for some quiet reflection. And it may have been the 15 beers that preceded that one, or the drops of mushroom oil the birthday girl had been distributing, but when I looked up into the purple-and-pink-streaked sky, the universe opened up and spoke my ultimate truth: I am too dumb to wear a precious heirloom every day.
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So this watch’s power wasn’t in its looks, nor it’s durability. It told the time fine, but the heartbreaking truth is, any old plastic quartz watch is more accurate than even the best Rolex or Patek Philippe. Certainly more so than my nearly 70-year-old Omega.
I was out of practical reasons to wear the watch. Its meaning would have to be based on feelings.
I knew wearing it made me feel good. Proud of who I am and where I’m from. I also found that, when I was in professional situations with intimidatingly successful older people, wearing it made me feel like less of a fraud. When I opened my mouth to speak, my voice trembled less, my shoulders remained square. The first time I tried this was in a meeting with a famous British film director who runs a charity we were pitching for. Afterwards, my watch received its first official compliment: ‘I think he actually liked you.’
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Most of my professional life takes place on Zoom now. But when the big dogs are coming to the meeting, the Omega is always on my wrist. Because after all, how can you be intimidated by some old boomer when you’re wearing the watch of a bloke who fought Nazis?
Since this realisation, things have spiralled. And hence, I spend my days obsessing over watches that fill me with a sense of power and meaning. A gold Rolex with a Buick logo engraved on the back, originally gifted by General Motors to a retiring employee after 40 years of service. A Tudor Submariner that survived a bullet hole in the Vietnam War and made its way back to its owner 50 years later. A Mickey Mouse Timex bought on a whim by a happy idiot on holiday.
None of this is real, of course. At the end of the day these watches, any watches, are inanimate objects. Empty vessels to project wishes and aspirations onto.
Unlike them, we aren’t finely tuned mechanical devices. Our cogs need some cushioning.
Maybe one day straight-up reality will feel like a realistic prospect. Until then, after surviving a day of soul-destroying Zooms, I’ll be drinking wine, searching eBay for the ‘90s surf brands I wore as a child, and falling asleep dreaming of the day I can afford a yellow-gold 1996 Rolex Day-Date that gives me all the power and charisma of Tony Soprano.
