Ask Me About My Watch: A £500 Lesson in Memory & Grief

Ask me about my Armani watch. You might as well; I’m going to tell you about it anyway. In Texas, with an English accent, I can just about get away with such incredibly obnoxious behavior.

“This is a £500 watch,” I’ll begin, being way more vulgar than I am comfortable being, but cutting very much to the chase. This is not a story about how cool I am because I have a cool watch. Is Armani still cool? Was it ever? I don't know. This is how cool I am not.

The point I’m making, though, in a roundabout way, is that nothing else I wear now or have ever worn has ever cost this much. I did once own an Armani shirt. I got it for about £15 in a second-hand shop in Newcastle. I wore that damn thing until it fell apart.

So, why do I have a £500 watch? Thank you for asking. Because of my dad, and the strange ideas he could get into his head sometimes. Strange ideas that, once they took hold, were impossible to dislodge. Up to the Armani watch – or the three Armani watches, to be precise, the strangest idea I was aware he’d had was his belief that the movies on TV kept playing in the background when the advertising breaks were on. So, even though an ad for dish soap might be on the screen, Clint Eastwood’s investigation into the Scorpio Killer was going on in the background, and when the advertising break was over, we just dropped back into the story wherever it happened to be.

I guess this explained to him why movies didn’t always seem to make sense when he watched them. But who really knows?

But, as he got old and maybe started to feel less permanent in this world, he got it into his head that his major problem was that he had nothing of significance to pass on to his children. He’d already asked each of his three sons to pick one item from the house to be claimed as an inheritance at some point in the future. I chose a wonderful lamp, from Singapore, in the shape of an ornately dressed Asian woman sitting with a bowl in her lap. It’s awesome. At least it was until it was dropped or bashed so there’s a large hole in one side. Now I have to ask my mom if I can have a second pick.

But I digress.

I can’t pretend to understand the workings of my dad’s mind for sure, so I’ll not presume to really know how and why he decided that watches were the solution to this non-problem – but that’s where he ended up. Three watches, identical, and worth a chunk of cash.

So, as I understand it, he and my ma took themselves up to the Big City and head for a pricey jewelers. There, I imagine, he announces what he’s looking for. And, says my ma, the staff immediately pull out the comfy chairs and the special coffee. They’re treated like the snooty saleswomen should have treated Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. My parents were not used to such treatment, which I’m sure made my dad feel even more generous.

So, they’re shown a selection of watches and, based on some unknown Dad criteria, he chooses three Armani silver watches, total cost £1,500. These, he has decided, will be the heirlooms that he’ll pass on to his trio of unsuspecting male children. Despite neither watches nor Armani having any real significance in our lives up to this point (except for the charity shop shirt, of course).

And so, that’s how it played out.

I don’t know what’s happened to the other two watches. One is probably in its box in a drawer somewhere. The second I imagine, perhaps uncharitably, blazed briefly and brightly on eBay.

Mine, I decided to wear. As a practical soul, I didn’t believe in keeping things for “special occasions”. A table should have stuff on it, shoes should be taken for a walk from time to time, and watches should be on your wrist as much as possible. This might be because I don’t have many options when it comes to these things. It’s perfectly possible, for instance, that I would feel differently about shoes if I had more than three pairs at any one time.

So, I wore my watch. And, when the occasion arose, I told the story. This story. And it was never a bragging story – look at my £500 watch! It was more a story of how such a not-me thing came to be attached to me.

But…time passed, my Dad died, and I was thousands of miles away. I felt my grief in memories, shared stories, but also in the things that we carry. At times of strong emotions, mere objects suddenly become totems of grief. Suddenly, the watch stopped being a watch, even a £500 watch, and became a Dad memory, an object imbued with the feelings I didn’t know how to process. 

The year I turned 50, the idea of a legacy, of what I leave behind, stopped seeming to be quite so alien. So, I put the watch away, for “special occasions”. It’s now a proper heirloom. I’ll pass it down to my oldest son when the time comes. And I’ll tell him that it came from his granddad and that it matters.