The 3 mistakes I made buying a vintage watch, my cautionary tale
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…
The post The 3 mistakes I made buying a vintage watch, my cautionary tale appeared first on Time and Tide Watches.
Watch Disasters is a new series on Time+Tide that describes, in chilling detail, incidences when owning an expensive watch goes wrong. This is not going to be comfortable reading, so prepare for the pain. Admittedly, this is a bit of a soft start. The ‘prodigal’ in the title gives it away. If you have a watch disaster with less of a happy ending, feel free to tell us about it at nicholas@timeandtidewatches.com I actually lost this watch. I have a collection of watches, and I hide them in different places. This watch, I forgot where it was for a good three years. I turned my house upside down, and I couldn’t find it. I reached a point where I had to emotionally detach and move on from it. But because I didn’t realise it was lost for a few months, that somehow made it better when the realisation came that I couldn’t find it. That’s fine, I thought, I’ve lost it. OK. Then I had a brainwave. Before I hid it, I was going away on a trip. It will be in my travel bag! I ransacked the bag, but no watch. Some time later I was actually going on…
Editor’s note: Omega’s Seamaster collection is vast and varied, and the Swiss watchmaking powerhouse isn’t shy when it comes to creating new and innovative variants of its iconic diving watch. A classic example of this explorative ethos is this — the Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean “Big Blue”. The gorgeous and amply proportioned 45.5mm case is hewn from solid ceramic, and finished in a gorgeous shade of blue, and contrasted by bright bursts of orange. It’s a compelling proposition for a great summer watch, especially when paired with its complementing navy blue and orange rubber strap with deployant clasp. What’s more, the Seamaster Planet Ocean “Big Blue” is actually an homage to the Omega Seamaster Automatic 120m Chronograph Ref.176.004, which was produced in the ’70s. Anyway, we were lucky enough to go hands-on with the “Big Blue” a little while ago, and these were our initial impressions. While one of the key trends of Basel 2017 was a move towards more wrist-friendly dive watches (see exhibits A and B), there’s no doubt that big and bold is still the name of the game. Omega’s latest PO, the “Big Blue”, delivers on both fronts, thanks to its whopping 45.5mm wide by 17.8mm high case made from…
Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the last five years, or you’ve had a complete moratorium on any type of connection to the Internet, chances are you’ve heard about Joe Rogan and his podcast. In fact, the comedian and former host of Fear Factor has such a large reach on the interwebs that his podcast has been listened to by hundreds of millions of people across the globe – it is unquestionably one of the most successful podcasts of all time. And Rogan will talk about literally anything, and host guests from all walks of life, whether they be other comedians, celebrities, authors, journalists, professors, doctors … you name it, chances are he’s had them on the show. Which brings me to why I’m writing this; you see, Rogan loves to talk about cars, and he’s had a fair few car journalists on his show in the past, one of whom is Matt Farah. And in addition to being a car journo, Farah is also a complete watch fanatic, and he even hosted his own podcast about watches called Watch and Listen. So, of course, when Farah appeared on Rogan’s podcast, the topic of watches inevitably came up, and the…
