Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –
Emily Dickinson
The first time I saw the watch, I was bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, shuffling through a crowded underground shopping mall in Hong Kong. I had landed a few hours earlier as a stopover on my way to Beijing - the first overseas trip on my Executive MBA programme. I spotted it in a glass cabinet and stopped to stare - I even took a photo so I would remember what it looked like because I didn't have the courage (or the energy) to go in and ask what the actual model was. Then I kept walking.
The last time I saw it was on a bright spring afternoon, on a busy Parisian street corner in the 6th arrondissement, waiting for an Uber. I didn't know it was the last time. I didn't know anything was happening at all.
I wouldn't call myself a watch person - not in the connoisseur sense. My childhood watch history began with a Casio digital that blew my mind with its stopwatch function and light-up screen but I longed for a watch I could wear in the water.
That materialised as a deeply questionable James Bond-themed number that was supposedly waterproof to 100 feet, though I doubt I ever tested it past ten. I’m not sure that it lasted more than a few months either - much to the relief of almost everyone I encountered due to the high pitched rendition of the 007 theme tune it could play on demand.
The one I actually loved was a Swatch Pop Swatch - a Sputnik. You could mix and match the circular watch faces and straps. The designs were a fashion statement. Popping out your watch face and trading with a friend, for an hour a day or sometimes longer was the ultimate sign of friendship as an 8 year old!
When I went away to boarding school at sixteen, my parents gave me a Tag Heuer stainless steel for Christmas. It was stolen my first term - I'd left my dorm unlocked one afternoon and a wayward young chap helped himself to it before absconding to Barbados and never returning to the school. Or my watch.
The lad who became my best friend at Rugby School, Westy, was a watch connoisseur by birthright - his father owned the UK's largest luxury watch retailer. Through Westy - who became my best man and is still one of my closest mates - I started to understand what watches actually meant to the people who loved them.
Eight years after we met, I helped Westy land a job on the same desk as me at JP Morgan. His father, in turn, offered to get me any watch I wanted at list price as thanks for getting Westy off his payroll!
Not knowing enough to have a strong opinion, I asked Westy what I should go for.
"No question - stainless steel, white-faced Rolex Daytona," he said, with the smile of someone who knows exactly what he's talking about.
There was a multi-year waitlist to buy one directly from a dealer. It was one of the most coveted pieces in the watch world. I used my first year bonus to pay for it and I still wear it regularly. It never ceases to draw compliments.
Which brings me to the watch I was wearing on that fateful afternoon in Paris.
I had coveted it since the Hong Kong shopping mall. But I had the Daytona, and I had my Garmin fitness tracker that rarely left my wrist - and the "want" column had never quite outweighed the "need" column (it sat firmly in the "want, not need" category, as so many of the best things do).
So when my wife handed me a small box on Christmas morning, I genuinely didn't see it coming. She'll admit herself it was a rare occasion when she both surprised me and completely nailed it. (I am - apparently - not the easiest person to buy for.)
I stood there in the kitchen in my Christmas onesie, the kids ripping through their own presents in the background, genuinely lost for words. Which, as my family will tell you, doesn't happen often.
I wore it proudly all Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Then came the pandemic, then the lockdowns, then an inadvertent new habit of wearing only my fitness tracker. Life normalised, the habit didn't shift, and the watch rarely made it out of the drawer.
Until Paris.
When the chance arose to meet my wife in Paris after a business trip, it felt like exactly the occasion to dust it off.
I put the watch on before leaving for the airport - it seemed safer on my wrist than in my bag for the overnight flight. On the Metro from Charles de Gaulle into the centre, I instinctively pulled my sleeve over it.
My plan was to get as close to the hotel as I could without changing lines, then order an Uber for the last mile.
Looking back, I know exactly where they came from: the doorway right next to Galways - the Irish pub on the left bank, in the shadow of Notre Dame.
My Uber pulled to the curb. Typically for Europe, it was a compact car. The driver helped me get my suitcase in the boot, then made his way to the front. I opened the rear passenger door and angled myself into the back row - one hand on the door frame for balance.
Then I was on the back seat with my legs hanging out of the car and my arm held aloft, a tightness and then a sharp tug at my wrist.
I pulled myself up. The driver had jumped out - almost annoyed, as if I'd made a clumsy entrance. And then I realised. The tugging was one of them working the clasp. The arm held up was the other one, shoving me down and holding me there while it happened.
Gone. All of it in seconds.
I stood up in the street. They were already gone.
A shopkeeper from the tacky gift shop next door - the kind that sells Eiffel Towers in a snow globe - told me he'd seen them run down a side street.
My heart was hammering. I felt something between shock, stupidity and a strange, flat calm.
Chasing them wasn't happening. I got back in the car.
I called my wife on the way to the hotel. She was lost for words - and then immediately, completely focused on the fact that I wasn't hurt. By the time I arrived, she'd alerted the concierge, who had looped in the hotel manager. Both met me at the door, brought me into a quiet room, and sat me down with a fresh coffee and a warm croissant straight from the boulangerie.
It’s remarkable how much better a buttery French croissant can make things feel.
The concierge went far beyond what anyone could have expected. He called the local police station. Then walked there with me. Sat with me while I waited. And when I was called into the interview room, he came in with me to interpret.
The French officer was embarrassed. He told me incidents like this had been rising, but with the Paris Olympics the following year the police were focussed on cleaning it up.
A couple of hours later - after the forms, the statements, the waiting - I left with a printed police report for the insurance company.
The concierge walked me back to the hotel. By then we'd been together most of the afternoon. On the pavement outside, he turned to me and said, quietly, in his careful English:
"I am sure this is very upsetting. But in the end - all you lost was a physical item. Thankfully it wasn't something worse. Thankfully you weren't hurt."
The directness and the simple truth of his statement felt powerful.
I was fortunate - fortunate to be in Paris, fortunate my parents were healthy and at home with the kids, fortunate not to have been hurt. The watch was beautiful and meaningful and missed. It was also just a thing.
A few weeks later, an email arrived from the chief of police for the 6th arrondissement. They'd tracked the pair from the street through the city's CCTV network.
A 21-year-old woman and her 19-year-old brother - Romanian, both young enough to have been completely different people under different circumstances. By the time they were caught, the watch was gone.
The Chief asked whether I wished to press charges.
I felt the resentment rise up in me - some satisfaction that karma had caught up with them. But I also felt some sadness - that at 19 and 21 this was already the life they were living - and what getting caught would now mean for them.
I told him to proceed. That was the last I heard from any of it.
Own The Now
I actually don’t think about what happened that much - I think I have blocked it out and moved on. The rest of the trip was memorable for so many other reasons.
But the watch mattered.
Of course it did. My wife's instinct, the Christmas morning surprise, the feeling I would get when I wore it - and when people complimented me on it - it all meant something.
But what the muggers took in those few seconds was an object. What I didn't lose - the afternoon in Paris, my wife already asking if I was okay before I'd finished telling her, the stranger who spent his afternoon at a police station for no reason other than kindness - that was the part that counted.
Own The Now, I suppose. Even when someone else has your watch.
Own The Now Challenge:
Is there something you're holding onto - a possession, a title, a version of yourself - that you've confused for something essential? What would change if tomorrow it was simply gone? And what would remain?
