All Things Considered

Seiko Faith

In a baking hot New Mexican outlet mall, another childish illusion died. Its loss was almost as bad as the loss of Santa Claus, and certainly as tragic as the final collapse of the tooth fairy theology, and it moved me further along in my increasingly apostatical progress throughlife.

All my conscious life, I had worshipped a Seiko wrist-watch. One with a rotating, multi-coloured bezel that delivered completely unnecessary esoteric information; with three or more little dials with tiny hands that whizzed round to advise you how many millionths of a second of your life you had just wasted watching the tiny hands whiz round; one with a dial so complex that by the time you'd worked out what time it was, it was too late anyway; one with so many knobs it would take you most of the flight time from New York to San Francisco to adjust the time zone setting; one so heavy that if you fell in a fast flowing river, your corpse would be discovered where you fell, anchored firmly to the river-bed by your time-piece, which would be informing the world that it was 2am in Abu Dhabi, and that you had drowned at a depth of sixteen point zero three feet, but were nonetheless still nine hundred and seven feet above sea level.

I coveted such a miraculous gadget with all the passion of the technologically incompetent and highly superstitious, and would gaze in awe at window displays of the beasts, all the really desirable ones just too expensive for me. And every time I felt that maybe my income had risen to a point where I might afford one, I found that they had all neatly leap-frogged just out of my reach once more.

I gave up, and bought a thoroughly boring but nicely coloured Swatch which didn't tell me anything really interesting, and then settled on a cheap and nasty Casio calculator watch which did lots of things that I couldn't really appreciate until my optician prescribed bi-focals.

Then, just a week ago, Our Lady of Clocks heard me. St Cecelia had finally interceded for me, and in front of me there appeared an outlet mall with a Seiko factory store. Trembling, I parked the Buick cock-eyed across two spaces, switched off the radar detectors, and rushed towards it muttering incoherent prayers of gratitude.

Inside this temple were enough holy relics to cure the chronologically lame, to heal the chronically late, and with alarms that would wake Lazarus in time forThe Simpsons.

The handmaiden who ran this temple came to help me as I goggled at case after case of now affordable watches. I told her my story, and she fished out various exotic creatures from their secure tanks, and made them perform tricks for me.

She was rather flawed as handmaidens go, and distracted often by the phone - this woman had believed that in an age of mass under-employment, nobody read the Saturday paper, and so she could not understand the unceasing flow of job applicants answering her advertisement for an assistant. She wouldn't tell them details over the phone, and made appointments for them, and then failed to explain to me the mysteries of a watch with lots of baby dials in its belly. This expert didn't know how to operate it and make the babies kick. What hope therefore had I, a horological neophyte, of ever making it do tricks? It looked harder to master than my lap-top computer -and that was a three month ordeal of headaches, insomnia and tearful phone calls to technical support. Worse, this watch's colour was false. It was gold-plated over base metal. It would tell dual time, but was confusing. If you rotated the bezel so that a different national flag moved to the top, it would move its minute and hour hands slowly and impressively to show what time it was in that nation, summer or winter, whether or not you actually knew which part of the world the flag referred to. It did most of the things my cheap and nasty did, but making it do them required specialist knowledge and stronger bi-focals. Worst of all, it wouldn't do currency conversion. That was the killer. That was where the tooth fairy came unstuck - molars were accidentally devalued and thus her financial, and ultimately her existential credibility dwindled and vanished.

I cannot go through life unable to know how much an article priced in lire in Rome might cost me in francs in Antwerp; whether a beret on offer in Holland might cost me less in Paris; or whether I should try to claim tax relief in England or America for something purchased with Danish Kroner.

The scales fell from my eyes. My twenty-five dollar cheapy did more than this gleaming bauble, and didn't require that I spend months learning a whole new catechism from a small print owners manual. In fact, my cheapy worked better, even if it did require a toothpick to operate the calculator, and I was unlikely get mugged for it in the dodgier areas of America that my geographically challenged agent sends me to. So even at a quarter of its original price, this gaudy talisman couldn't outperform my old, scratched, grimy, faithful cheapy.

My long held faith suddenly shrivelled, and sadly, I turned away from the altar.