When I first became interested in watches there was a watch that seemed like a distant dream. It was an unobtainable watch from an unattainable brand to me and so it sat in the back of my mind for the… Read More ›
Articles
My watch story: a Bulova Accutron Snorkel 666 feet
When I was a child, my father used to wear a Bulova Accutron Snorkel 666 feet which I was always fascinated by. He treasured it a lot and I remember watching him staring at it for much longer than he… Read More ›
1969 Was a Watershed Year
So many significant world events and developments occurred in the legendary year 1969 that Billy Joel could write a song simply by listing them — hell, he could probably even dedicate a verse to watches. This was the year that… Read More ›
The Tropical Dial Is a Flaw
And with a tropical dial, something sincerely has gone wrong: around the middle of the last century, Rolex primed its dials with a finish that was supposed to protect the watches from sun damage. Bizarrely, it had the exact opposite… Read More ›
To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time
When my wife died, my life was thrown out of time. My past didn’t seem to connect to my present. How had the last 13 years turned me into an only parent of two young children, owner of a house… Read More ›
How did the qwerty keyboard become so popular?
Typing at 60 words per minute (wpm) – no stretch for a good typist – means five or six letters striking the same spot each second. At such a speed, the typist might need to be slowed down for the… Read More ›
Instagram is awful
Recently I decided to set up a new Instagram account and to write about Tudor watches. I wanted to experiment with simple images and longer form text than you normally see on Instagram. No great ambitions here, just something to… Read More ›
No backdoor…
Cook and Sewell met with Eric Holder and Jim Cole, then the deputy attorney general, in late 2014, and FBI agents told them they were “interested in getting access to phones on a mass basis.” This was way before the… Read More ›
Behind Brexit lies a yearning for a past we destroyed
Was that period perfect? Of course not. Bad things happened, poverty existed, governments screwed up, and there were wars and reversals and crises. But the general trend was for increased wealth, health, life expectancy, security, openness, home-ownership, saving, disposable income,… Read More ›
When your grail is not the best, it’s still your grail
When I first became very interested in watches, there was one particular model that I always aspired to own. It was the Tudor Black Bay Red and this feeling never really left me. Aspirational is the word because after running… Read More ›
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