This timepiece has had a long, illustrious and rather strange history. I’ve owned it for almost 35 years. I know that because it was my 18th birthday pressie off my Mum and Dad. I wore it day-in, day-out for probably 20+ years, hence all the scratches and scuffs. I went to celebrate Shazbop’s birthday by going bowling and for an Italian meal and stayed at her house overnight. The following day, I got home and found my watch was not on my wrist, nor in any of my bags. I’d lost it.

Shazbop turned her house upside-down. I phoned the restaurant, the bowling alley, the bus company and the police but to no avail. My watch was gone. I was devastated. I bought a new watch. I thought of it from time-to-time but was completely taken aback when I received a parcel in the post about five years later addressed to me from Shazbop. Inside it contained a plastic make-up jar. Inside the make-up jar was the watch, along with a grovelling letter telling me she’d found it trapped down the wrong side of the bed when she was moving the bed before moving house. Wow. What a nice surprise.

I wore it again for a bit but to be honest, its face is tiny and as my eyesight has gone the way of all flesh (as I’ve said before), so I put it away and didn’t wear it again. On 9/11 I stopped wearing a watch at all. Not because of the terrible thing that happened that day but I remember it because I stopped on that day.

Until I started at Uni I never wore a watch again. I didn’t need to. My pooters all had clocks, we have a clock at home and one in my car so I never felt the need. Since I’ve been at Uni, I do need to wear a watch because I am no longer always in the vicinity of a clock. There is a paucity of them on campus. I looked for one of my abandoned watches and couldn’t find one at all. I turned the house inside and out to no avail. I found a cheap watch – one of the sort you can buy for a couple of quid in Trago – and wore that for a few months. Then I was trying to pull a jiffy bag from the pile to send something precious and guess what? My later watch came popping out of the cupboard with the jiffy bag. I got it a new battery but for some reason it’s stopped working. This happened at more-or-less the same time as my Mum and Dad turned up with my Bambi watch so I’ve been wearing that ever since. On Friday I was looking for button badges and tipped out a little box of junk jewellery to find this watch inside it along with half-a-dozen unmatched earrings and a couple of necklaces with broken clasps! I wound it up and away I went. It’s not desperately reliable in as much as it’s losing about 20 minutes a day but as long as I know this is happening, I can calibrate myself! So, I’m now wearing again the watch that was a special gift for a special birthday that was lost then found then lost then found again.