An hour piece

I found recently that i like wearing a watch.

Big deal I hear you say, but, hey, stay with me.

As a youth I didn’t need to know, no kid does – time stands still.

At University there was always a clock in the lecture rooms, as a traveller I used those in the railway stations and later, not wearing one became a badge of pride – a rebel against watch conformity.

I began wearing a watch when Alex, my third juggling partner, started having carefully choreographed trouble following our improvised chaos on stage.

I bought an old specimen in a flea market, it didn’t work, but I would bang on it in consternation trying to create a further level of apparent panic in our well controlled theatrical disasters.

When we finally agreed to go separate ways I continued to wear it as a reminder of those shared triumphs, and in the summer when I found that doing so left an interesting sun tan band around my wrist, I decided to continue.

Somewhere I traded it in for something that worked and recently I noticed that nobody wears a watch these days; so once again I wear it with pride, a rebel against a watch-less conformity.

A few months ago the strap detached itself and I struggled to force the springy bouncy bit back into the impossible to see hole, in the “forget it, it’s so difficult to hold” metal frame.

Unbelievably I succeeded!

However, in my anxious excitement I had reversed the strap and now had black on one side and off white on the other. Yuk.

Could I undo it?

I figured that I would wait until the next occasion, it would be bound to fall off again – this was, after all the third occasion.

Did it?

Last night I noticed that the hands were not moving so I visited Gerard, local photographer, framer and supplier of watch batteries.

The last time I had visited was to request help in getting a memory chip in my camera to accept edits, an operation that lead to a miniscule piece of plastic catapulting out of his hands and landing somewhere on his floor. After an hour of looking he promised to try again if he ever found it.

This time he took out his little box of little screwdrivers, flicked, twisted and replaced, tick tock, thank you three euros.

So I asked if he could do the strap.
He did.

But, after several months of being curled backward it now refuses to lie snugly on my wrist – it feels as if my underpants are on inside out.

So, I hear you saying, so what?

Er…………….. Maybe I was wrong and the story went nowhere. Sorry about that.

Still It’s part three of a challenge I set myself and I wanted to see if I could do it when the subject was t… - oops almost said it - itself.