An Irishwoman’s Diary on the watch my father wore

My father is a man of a certain generation who has never worn jewellery. He married at a time when women wore wedding rings, but men did not. I have never seen him wear so much as a tie-pin. What he does wear, however, is a watch. Every day, my father carefully straps his watch to his left wrist within minutes of getting up.

When I was a child, I didn’t have a watch. In those days, watches were strictly rite-of-passage gifts; expensive, breakable items that were not suitable for a child who frequently climbed trees, and who was in the habit of losing things. That was me. I learned to tell the time by our electric kitchen clock, which was in the shape of a ship’s wheel. When the power went off, as it frequently did then, time literally stood still on our kitchen wall.

The watch my father wore when I was growing up was a gold Omega Constellation chronometer. He sometimes took it off and let me look at it.

I did not know what a chronometer was, but it was one of the words on the face. “Automatic chronometer, officially certified” was written on it in tiny letters.

There was also a little star on the dial. I loved stars; bright secrets that came out at night. On the back of the watch, there were more stars; eight in total. They extended like a halo over a shape I did not recognise, but which my father told me was an observatory, where one went to study those night secrets.

Engraved on the back were the words: "To Joseph Boland, Carlow, 31.3.1960." Years before I was born, my father had worked as secretary for Carlow County Council. The watch was his farewell gift from colleagues when he moved on to his new job as Clare county manager.

For my confirmation, I duly received a Tissot watch from my parents that I wore through my teenage years and into my early twenties. I took it with me to Australia when I lived there for a year after college, and I left it in a cabin in the Daintree rainforest in Queensland a week before returning home. By then, I had decided I no longer wanted to wear a watch. I did not like the idea of being tethered to the ever-present reminder of time ticking away on my wrist. I guess you could say I intentionally lost it.

For years afterwards, I did not wear a watch. By then, people did not need to consult an analogue timepiece to know where they were in the day. Like millions of others, my mobile phone and computer screen now provided me with that information.

My parents celebrated a significant wedding anniversary some years ago, and for his gift, my mother gave my father a new Omega watch, with a message engraved on the back. The gift took him by surprise. Now he had two watches.

One evening, when I was visiting, he suddenly presented me with the old watch over dinner. I have two brothers, and I pointed this out with some anxiety, feeling slightly old-fashioned and sexist as I did.

But as I no longer climb trees, or tend to lose things much any more, I accepted his gift.

My brothers assure me they do not mind, nor for that matter, does my sister, that our father’s Omega has come my way.

So I started wearing a watch again; one that has become a much-admired talking point, and which I no longer feel complete without. My left wrist doesn’t feel right without that now-familiar weight on it.

And as I began wearing my father’s watch, I finally discovered the meaning of the word “chronometer”. It means that you do not need to wind it. The watch operates by the engineering magic of kinetic energy; the motion of my wrist alone keeps the mechanism going.

In passing on his watch to me, my father has also passed on all those years of kinetic energy that he generated in keeping it going. It still keeps near-perfect time.

Between us, we have now kept that watch ticking for more than half a century.