TheBigYin
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I love this watch so much.
I've always had a soft spot for Smiths Watches (and clocks, instruments and so forth, but mainly watches)
Well - I say Always, but I can pin it down to the exact day my fascination began.
July 19th 1969. 5 days after my 6th birthday, I was allowed to "stay up late" because there was something that was going to happen that was to become part of History. Some of you will have worked it out from the date already.
To pass the time in the evening, my grandad decided to learn me how to tell the time, using his Pocket Watch - a lovely, recently purchased Smiths Empire that he'd bought the same year I came into the world, when the previous one finally gave up the ghost after 20 years of being used for timekeeping down the local pit, where he was a deputy. We spent hours that evening with my grandad setting a time on the watch, then asking me what time it said, explaning the wierd nuances of how the english express time - five past, ten past quarter past, twenty past, twenty five past, half past, twenty five to, etc etc. It must have been too much for me and I fell asleep, curled up on the settee with my head near his watch - the ticking as effective as any lullabye.
Then, I was gently shaken awake, around 9pm (BST)** - "wake up lad, you don't want to miss this..."
We sat there, 3 generations - me, my dad, and my grandad, open mouthed, scarcely daring to breath until we heard those haunting words "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed".
Of course, we all knew what was next, and spent the rest of the night waiting for the inevitable...
eventually 03:56 BST, just as the sky was beginning to turn a slight rise hue - not quite dawn, but the glow of pre-sunrise - we were "present" when the second immortal phrase was uttered "That’s one small step for a man…one giant leap for mankind.”
I turned to see my grandad, looking at his watch - "I wanted to remember the time when we first set foot on somewhere other than earth..." then I saw the tears in his eyes. I turned to my dad, and realised he was looking at my and my grandad, with tears in HIS eyes - at which point I didn't see anything more for the salty blur of tears...
My Grandad disappeared into the kitchen, returning with 2 small dark bottles and 2 glasses - he poured one Guinness for my dad, and the other for himself. As they talked, and drank, and refilled their glasses, I curled up on the end of the Sofa, holding my Grandad's watch and fell asleep - my six year old brain knew I'd witnessed something amazing, and with the optimism of youth - and which was prevalent in that era, I knew that there was nothing we couldn't do if we put our minds to it...
Time passes, and in the space of a single lifetime, the Apollo program was deemed too expensive for what it provided, The Space shuttle program began, and ended, We had Concorde - commercial airline travelling at Mach 2, again now gone. Everything in the world seems to be becoming retrograde - a symptom of a stagnating and failing civilisation. Smiths watches closed, victim of the Quartz Crisis. The brand has bee resurrected thankfully, using design clues from their back catalogue (and other companies work it has to be said) - I've got an original Smiths Empire wristwatch that's older than I am, I'm looking for a Smiths fobwatch from 1963 (my grandad's watch was left to me in his will, but had mysteriously disappeared from the house before the will was read) as a Tie to this story - but as a daily wear brand new watch, I had to go with this one...
Wearing this watch, I try and conjour that sense of optimism and confidence that the human race can still do great things...
I Try, but in the end, it's only a watch...
** ok, I'll admit it - the timings were taken from historical records, and would have been delayed by a fair amount, as live worldwide broadcasting without the modern infrastructure wasn't exactly "a thing" - but my memories of what the time "felt like" matched up to within a couple of hours - and i'm not one to let a little pedantry get in the way of telling a story that means so much to me...
