How did I accidentally become a vintage watch guy? Partly, I blame the fact that I’ve got the spindly wrists of a teenage girl. That meant I naturally gravitated towards smaller dials. But I also put it down to the tawdry state of my finances. When I first started to get into watches — before the retro boom really started to kick — you could pick up an Omega Speedmaster in decent nick for $600. Given my financial reality, vintage watches made a lot of sense. I quickly became a sucker for their personal histories, too. Take the 1950s Zenith dress watch I bought online from a woman in Rome. Uneasy that I was about to wire cash to a total stranger (in a foreign country), I attempted to strike up a connection, hoping it’d reduce my chance of being swindled. In the correspondence that ensued, Paola explained the Zenith in question had belonged to her late grandfather, a general in the Italian army. She even shared this photo of him. Admittedly, if this straight-backed man on a white stallion knew that his watch would one day hang off the wrist of a feckless media twat like me, he would surely be turning…
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