Buying, Selling, & Collecting: The Story of My Life in Three Swatches

If memory serves, I was 11 years old when I first saw it. My father’s new job had moved us across the country to a small English market town, an alien place. I’d started a new school where the boys spoke differently to those I’d known, and I felt neither sure of nor particularly happy with where I was – or who I was. Toward the western end of the town’s high street, beyond Woolworths and the banks, and where the street began to fall away to an old square where sheep were once traded, there was a small jeweler of no particular repute. In the window was an unremarkable cluster of watches, jewelry, and useless knickknacks, and in the middle of all that was a Swatch with a smoky case, a petrol blue dial, gold hour markers, and a tan leather strap. I had to have it. This was 1991, Swatch was in its heyday, and I was now old enough to grasp, however loosely, the power of brand. Its simple, fluid proportions and color palette sat well with me too, although again, I doubt I would have been able to articulate any of that. But I had no money. Even at £12, it was beyond a boy with weekly pocket money of £1.10 (10p for every year of my age). I remember going into that cramped little shop and asking the man behind the counter if it was possible to keep it to one side for me until I could afford to buy it. It was not, he said. It was that kind of shop. That kind of town. I walked often past that window. Each time, I would check to see whether the watch was still there. I remember a tension as I got nearer, worried it might have gone, frustrated I couldn’t afford it. The weeks went by. Summer came, I turned 12, and my father put me on an allowance of £12 a month, bringing the petrol-blue-dialed Swatch suddenly, gloriously into budget. And so I bought it. I loved that watch. It never left my wrist. I slept with it on. The tan strap came and went in a fog of teenage sweat, replaced by a blue strap with brown stitching. I threw away the original, so that the smoky case was left paired with a translucent clasp. It wasn’t my last mistake. As the 1990s progressed, so too did the popularity of digital watches wrapped in thick layers of black rubber. A boy called Simon had a Casio with a world time function, and for reasons I don’t especially recall, one day at school I traded my petrol-blue-dialed Swatch with him. Sometime later, I convinced him to trade back. We weren’t friends and I forget the conversation. But not the feeling of reunion. Through my teenage years, there were other watches. A Databank. An analog/digital hybrid. A lurid green plastic thing exchanged for cereal tokens. They came and went. At length, I turned 18. The watch I wore as a 12-year-old had by now seemingly shrunk, and I found myself in the market for something more befitting of a frame that had just topped out at six and a half feet. My grandmothers and an aunt had given me money for my birthday that year, which happened to fall on a bank holiday Monday, as our public holidays are known. My father, ever the globe-trotter, decided the thing to do to celebrate was to drive me and some friends to France for lunch. In duty-free, there was a carousel of dangling new Swatches. On it, I saw a piece with a dark blue dial on a light blue leather strap. A steel Irony. The dial markings included the half hours, depicted as 1 1/2, 2 1/2, and so on. A curio typical of Swatch design experimentalism that I understood little of but liked. It had a red seconds hand and a red glass insert in the crown. I bought it. And I loved it. Three years after that lunch, I was at university and coming of age. My girlfriend was a generous soul and far too kind to me, and when she asked me what I wanted for my 21st, I took her to Selfridges on Oxford Street where I had identified a third Swatch. An Irony chronograph. It had a metallic petrol blue dial, with darker matte blue counters, and a blue leather strap. She bought it for me. And I loved it. In fact, I loved all three of those Swatches so much that I never let them go. I still have them. They’re right here. Sitting on my desk next to me as I write. My young life. More than half a lifetime ago. In three Swatches. Recently, I discovered Swatch has been working on a search tool of every watch it’s ever made. I got digging. And found my watches. The first is the Ascot, reference GX117. Mine is not what it was when it sat in that window. The smoky veneer is worn and patchy, the lume in the hands crumbled, and the replacement strap crusty and split, held together by stitching now dulled with time. The plastic crystal is heavily scratched, playground scars that will never heal. The second, with its red-tipped crown, is the Ocean Storm, reference YGS103. The strap is so battered that when I sent a picture of it to Swatch they concluded it was a replacement. It is not. And the third. That girlfriend was far too good to let go. I married her two years later, wearing that watch. Secret Agent, reference YCS401G. Not the symbol of the commitment we made all those years ago, perhaps, but then the story of that watch is ours now, and not its maker’s. I don’t wear these watches anymore, and couldn’t tell you when I last did. But I still have them. And I’ll never, ever move them on. Until I go, that is. By then I’ll have made sure my children know the stories. And remember me and their mother by them. By these watches. No doubt my son will do the same when he becomes a father. He’s 11 now. His watch? A blue Swatch with a blue dial and a blue strap. And he loves it. Robin Swithinbank is an independent journalist, writer, and regular contributor to The New York Times International, Financial Times, GQ, and Robb Report. He is also Harrods' Contributing Watch Editor.Ever since boyhood, this brand has seen me through my milestones.