Joe Bennett: The butcher, the baker and the watch mender

Between the butcher and the baker in this parade of fundamentals stood the watch mender's shop. Photo / 123rf

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.)

And this parade of shops was effectively a history of our species. First there was
a butcher's shop, a real traditional butcher's shop with a window full of the flesh of animals and birds.

Beyond the window was a counter where the butcher wrapped your daily meat in brown paper, and beyond that a hatch where you could see another butcher butchering. He had the knife, the skills and the meaty forearms that have been the signature of his trade for millennia.

Next door stood a greengrocer, selling the flesh of plants, the roots of plants, the fruit of plants, a bit less sentient than animals and birds perhaps, but still grown and killed for our benefit.

Next door but one on the other side, a bakery, all founded on the seeds of grasses, ground to flour, mixed with water to make a dough and then cooked on the fire, a skill as ancient as our species. For all our technology how far have we really come?

We learned to preserve food too, and preserves were to be found in the dairy next door: the smoked meats, and canned vegetables and jars of jam.

And the word dairy reminds us how we learned to steal the milk of other mammals to feed our young and to make it into cheese and butter and yoghurt. Oh what a greedy, selfish thieving beast we are.

But also what a clever one, for between the butcher and the baker in this parade of fundamentals stood the watch mender's shop.

The walls were hung with clocks and watches by the hundred, beneath which sat perhaps half a dozen men and women, old and young, each at a high little counter hunched over something small.

Here was artifice. Here was the skill of making. Here was man the thinker and the user of tools. And all in the service of measuring the element we live in, the rolling stream of time.

Would they be able to fix my watch? Oh yes, said the young woman who served me, she had no doubt of it.

And, cheered by what I'd seen, I bought a steak from the butcher, a bunch of carrots from the greengrocer, a loaf of bread from the baker and I drove them back to the cave where I put wood on the fire and sat me down for a nice long think.