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At a loss as to what to do after I bought my (and the cats) super strength joint supplements from a local health food shop. I trundled along the shopping mall concourse and being the adventurous type decided to find an exit through a part of the mall I never venture down, throngs of weekend shoppers passed me by in a heated scent of consumerist fervor I soon found myself in front of a jewelery store, its window display overflowing with trays of watches in super florescent lighting.
I stopped and considered all the glittering timepieces before me, the passing crowd now ebbing away along with the traces of social anxiety they always bring out in me and like some beady eyed magpie caught by the glint of something out of the ordinary. I found myself wondering if there was any other creature as fascinated over time as human beings? What makes us so preoccupied with measuring it, does the grandeur of the watch piece makes us any better at mastering it and how did our ancestors cope before the advent of personal watches?
Way back in the mists of history (there was a lot of fog back then) my ancestor Deryik had a typical day divided into two parts, the light bit and the dark bit , shiny warm thing in the sky for the first half, so you can get up and muck about then come home when it got dark and cold.
On occasion a little shiny thing plus lots of really little shiny things filled the dark sky, it could get pretty spectacular especially beside an open fire, with roasting chicken wings and flagons of grog etc, plus the occasional dragon and saber tooth tiger, which were out there, nobody quite knew where but we were all agreed they were defiantly out there, that much we did know.
The year was divided into four parts, namely; bloody cold, not so cold, warm, and not so warm. Nature for the most kept pretty regular on the timekeeping front, and even if you weren't bothered about the cold, the trees and flowers always kept reminding you which part of the year you happened to find yourself in anyway, brilliant, time knew it's place.
Whereas we as a species have become so regimented and retentive for want of a better term that time fixes us into three dimensions , the penultimate forth nail in the walking existence we call normality.
look at me I've got my own bit of jangly shiny time wrapped around my wrist or is it more like tagging for remand prisoners on day release.
So I found myself wondering about this and the myriad designs visibly constrained by an almost universal set of dimensions, imagining some poor wretch of watchmaker hunched over a workbench tasked with creating a device more desirous for its looks than functionality.
In actuality watch manufacturing is for the most part a cut an paste computer aided design which automatically configures the machinery to spew out streams of identikit watches in some far flung third world factory shop floor where some lowly paid worker tasked with quality control could live for a month nay a year on the purchase cost now RRP'd in this suburban palace to consumerism, AKA as demonstrated by yours truly now transfixed by the glittering timekeeping hype layered out before me like some kind of timepiece porn gallery.
in my parents day talk over watches would involve the precision and engineering such creations would have taken in their making (when ye old watchmaker was an actual human being) and as to the design itself well that was nice but almost secondary, of most concern was it's capability in not "losing time".
Getting your first wristwatch was a rite of passage in itself.
As my beady but now slightly glazed eyes took in the scene before me one watch of the "G-Schock" variety stood out looking like a comic book freebie with over sized watch face complete with green luminous buttons attached to the sides of a miniature Olympic stadium strapped around ones wrist with what looked more like an off cut of my trouser belt.For the benefit of my readers I should point out that I was looking at the "adult" watch display, how I smirked at the over frothing imagination one would need to believe such an edifice would complement one's sense of style or even worse as my blood chilled of the seething undercurrent this heralded to changing social norms.
Smirk as did it wasn't long before I was considering some glorious time piece f aux pas of my own, I am guilty of having far too many watches than I actually need, but how many timepieces are too many ? I think more than two functioning pieces should suffice a gentlemen of good character as to have any more is really an invitation to madness, I can vouch for that.
The last watch I purchased buoyed my green credentials to new heights as it never requires a battery, and I'm not talking about those technologically avant gard self winding watches of the 60/70's powered as they were by dubious wrist actions of the wearers.No this watch has a miniature solar panel built into the dial face and so long as I never live in the polar regions or drop it into the back of a sofa and it's perpetual darkness this watch will keep -as it seems- perfect time.
Smugly content about such eco friendly timekeeping, compared to my peers and their flawed "feet of clay" lithium based battery power timepieces, I stove through the day safe in the knowledge that my green credentials were now "+1" compared to both fellow advocates and of course the slope headed heathen watch wearers and their toxic lithium landfill timepieces.
The realization that the raw materials combined with transportation and production techniques required to manufacture such technological marvels like these modern day timepieces, mobile phones and computers have polluted a greater volume of the planet , than any of my forebears could ever have imagined.
The only personal time piece that's eco friendly is a stick in the ground or on a grand scale Stonehenge, while any watch that can actually "lose time" is a friend indeed.
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