My watch took to working intermittently, and a watch that works intermittently is a watch no longer. It's an ornament.
Not much of an ornament either, this watch. Thirty years ago it was a cheap silver-coloured thing and now it's a cheap bronze-coloured thing, but I am fond of it by reason of those 30 years that have worn us both down.
I put a new battery in it only last month, so I did not know what could be wrong with it. Without much hope I googled watch mender. Time was when every small town had one, a man with a tall stool and a high workbench and a magnifying contraption attached to his glasses. He would mend and clean watches and clocks, tending to their movements with an array of lovely, tiny tools. A mechanic of the very small.
What did him down was the quartz watch like mine. It was the first whiff of an electronic age. Marchini came to school with one in about 1971. We clustered round. He had to press a little button to make the numbers light up. I thought the thing ugly and a backward step, but I was looking at the future. Quartz is far more accurate that any mechanism. It never needs cleaning. Just give it a tiny battery once a year and it goes for ever. It is a better watch. And if anything does go wrong you just throw it away because quartz is abundant and cheap. Soon they were giving away digital watches with a tank of petrol.
If there was still a watch mender in town I thought he'd be some wizened ancient working from home, catering to collectors and dealers. But to my surprise there was a proper watch mender's shop on the far side of town and I drove there and it was situated in a parade of shops. (For readers who shop only at malls and supermarkets, a parade of shops is located in that strange intemperate place the outside world, where weather happens.)