My life-story in watches...

As a young man, I attended a technical school that originally was a watchmaking institution.

When I went there, in the early 60s, watchmaking was only one area of expertise that school prepared students for. Measuring instruments and mechanical engineering had by then, evolved into its two main specialty areas.

Watches should have been my passion, but that wasn’t meant to be. By contrast my son is a watch fanatic; at last count he said that he owned nine of them and keep on buying and selling them! As a kid, I received my first watch from my Godfather on the occasion of my Solemn Communion, when I was about 12.

This rite of passage was then a big deal in France. I didn’t fall in love with the LOV branded timepiece, but kept it through my early twenties which says a lot about its durability!
In 1972, as I was traveling through Hong-Kong, I purchased a beautiful Seiko, automatic chronograph. It was heavy, but I enjoyed it many for many years!

Later, when I moved to America, I fell in love with the cheap Casio watches, and over the years, like the perfect nerd that I must have been, wore most of the brand’s iterations of calculator watches, in spite of my big, fat fingers which should say a lot about my dexterity!

At the beginning of this century, I broke my loyalty to the Japanese brand to experiment with a Suunto, altimeter watch that wasn’t user friendly at all and was supposed to supply me with my vertical feet when I skied or hiked in the mountains.

I move to a Garmin, GPS watch that could do as much as my previous watch and some more. It didn’t last very long and this heralded my comeback to Casio.

Today, and two models later, I wear one of its atomic and solar-powered model and I love it. Now, you’ll ask, what about a smart-watch?

Well, not now. I feel that my smartphone brings me more than enough stuff and frankly, I love a watch that keeps PERFECT time, is quite cheap and don’t ever need to be rewound or recharged!