Swatch out...

If you could see the rest of this picture you’d see a twenty-something curly-headed rogue, smoking an extra long Rothman’s, wearing an absolutely hideous shirt and looking decidedly puffy around the face – it must have been a heavy one the night before. I had plenty of those, still do.

Of course these aren’t my main reasons for cropping the picture (says he) so that all it includes is my hands holding something which is probably a fleece belonging to one of the three children who shared my life at the time - or rather let me share theirs.

Now, I’d like you to pay particular attention to my watch. See it? Sorry it’s a bit fuzzy but it was probably taken with one of those throw away cameras that came with free developing; you know the deal, you post off the Freepost envelope and two weeks later you get back 16 photographs of nothing much in particular, half of which were over exposed, out of focus, or half obscured with a big pink thumb. You don’t? Well, I’m getting old; it was all the rage back then.

Anyway, that watch… it got me into a lot of trouble one way or another, probably ended up changing my life; but for better or worse I’ve never really been able to tell. Life’s like that sometimes - something happens that leads to another thing and then, by snowball effect, you end up hardly recognising your life at all.

That watch is a Swatch, an eighties fashion accessory. ‘Fashion that ticks’ the hoardings said, one of the first before they became complicated and overly colourful. I seem to remember that they came in a number of basic colours, blue, red, white and yellow. I’m not sure about green, orange or purple but I expect that they did. Mine was a white one. I was very stylish.

One day I caught the strap of my Swatch on my desk drawer handle and it snapped. They had a tendency to become brittle and do that, so off I went to the Swatch shop in my lunch break to buy another. I don’t remember the exact details, but on my way I bumped into a work colleague who asked me where I was going, so I told her. She asked if she could come along too, as the strap of her white Swatch needed replacing also. I didn’t see why not, although we hardly knew each other, so off we went together.

In the shop I couldn’t decide between a blue strap and a red one. I wanted to jazz up my Swatch and thought that having a different coloured plastic strap was just the way to do it. Some time later Swatch hit on the idea themselves along with literally thousands of other colour-ways, but they weren’t doing it at the time. I ummed and I arred, but still couldn’t decide.

My colleague was thinking blue, and when I said that I couldn’t decide an idea popped into my head. Would she go along with it I wondered? No harm in trying, after all everyone loves a trier, so I suggested that she buy the blue strap and I buy the red and then we swap half a strap with each other giving us both red, white and blue Swatches (well, it was the eighties). I said I thought it’d look cool and she agreed. So we purchased our straps and went back to the office where we exchanged half straps and got on with our work making ads.

Anyway that should have been the end of it, but the world is complicated and intentions often misread. I won’t go into the details (they aren’t as dastardly as you might expect) but suffice it to say that the exchange of straps was interpreted as something more than a fashion statement by my colleague and I, being very male and quite bored at the time, allowed myself to get sucked into her fantasy until it started to become mine as well.

It’s a long time ago now but at the time… well, as I said these things tend to snowball, and before I knew where I was my life had turned upside down and I was given a couple of ultimatums by a couple of people and I needed to make a choice and I hate choices, always tending to take the easiest route for my own comfort, and that’s what I did on this occasion. Of course, and even so, in the end it didn’t work; they say that trust can’t be rebuilt, and I guess it was one of the nails in a coffin that I don’t like to admit I hammered together myself along the way.

She died a few years back, the girl with the other half of my Swatch strap. Breast cancer, I found out long after the event.

I’ve got into these types of muddles since. It seems I’ll never learn my lesson, but the Swatch strap exchange was so innocuous I couldn’t have know where it would lead. As the Swatch adverts used to say: ‘Time is what you make of it’. I wonder what I would have made of mine without my Swatch and that ridiculous strap, and I wonder what my life would be now if I wasn't such an emotional coward?