Watches are inherently masculine.

Oh yes they are.

The manifestation of a linear worldview captured behind glass, they are professional compartmentalisers: consistent, relentless, cruel little timelords that delight in their power to divide and conquer the day. Ever since a huddle of mechanical-minded fifteenth-century German geeks invented the mainspring and miniaturised the clock, men have taken particular and perverse pride in strapping aggressively functional chronographs to their wrists, as if to demonstrate the truth that their day job photoshopping food porn in a flock-wallpapered media agency in Shoreditch doesn’t preclude them from the sudden requirement to rescue a nuclear warhead from a bunker 20,000 feet under the sea before trekking across the desert without a map, nipping into space to dispose of it safely, and then swaggering into a cocktail party at precisely 23:59:09.

As any man will tell you, time works differently in the female realm. Our universe is the very definition of relativity. Years drop away at our command so that we’re permanently thirty-three. Breakfast can start at 8am and continue til lunch, depending on the GI of our carbs. If you’re late, you’re late (even if you’re not) because we’ve decided that you need to realise that your failure to hang out the washing last night was but the tip of your iceberg of chilly disrespect for our much-abused selves. So, faced with the resolutely functional dictatorship of the watch, we subvert (although sadly not always in style). We don uselessly decorative wrist-baubles, illegibly minimalist or maximalist so as to prove that time is but our irrelevant plaything, ignored at whim.

OK, OK, so some of us females are actually high functioning, punctual, left-brained amateur astronauts who love nothing more than a expertly engineered wrist-toy, an orderly appointment book and the occasional nuclear-busting scuba dive, but you can’t deny that a big black rubberised penis-replacement on your arm looks just as stupid as a kitsch Paul & Joe diamanté-eyed kitty-clock. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, so you’d better look damn hot in the meantime, and it’s difficult to find that perfect balance between male functionality and female elegance.

So I’ve done the searching for you. For Christmas, I’m getting a Rotary Les Originales Gents Gold-plated Case Watch, the perfect combination of reliable craftsmanship, gentleman’s-club androgyny, and lots of shiny sparkly gold.

Pity about the diving, though, as it’s only splash-proof. Damn. Suppose I’ll have to sit by the fire with a snowbumbletini instead.

- Molly Flatt runs the Hitchcock Blonde website

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under The Perfectionist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.