all I would like is a 30+ year old Kenwood Chef
😆 I’ve already agreed with my mum that I’ll get her Kenwood Chef when she goes. It was a wedding present in the mid-70s and some of my most treasured memories are of making stuff with it. They certainly don’t make them like that any more, the thing will probably outlast me too.
As for watches, sure – you can look at them as jewellery. No-one really needs a watch anyway – there are more then enough clocks around to get by without one. Cubic Zirconia isn’t *that* different to diamond, after all. A bespoke suit isn’t *that* different to an off-the-peg £100 job from M&S. An Inbred frame isn’t *that* different from an IF.
I like the engineering of them, as I said. I love that I have something on my wrist that has all these fascinating cogs, springs, screws and jewelled pivots (and yes, I do open them up). That with nothing more than the energy of moving my arms and hands about in my everyday activities, it stores enough energy to tick away over half a million times a day yet manages to stay accurate to within a second in that time. I prefer the gentle second-hand sweep of a nice mechanical movement over the jarring tick-tick of a quartz. I have a kind of nostalgia for a time before I was born when owning (or being given) a wristwatch was a big deal and it would be worn for decades, a time before Swatch and Casio turned them into disposable plastic fashion accessories.
That’s not to say you have to spend a fortune – neither of my autos cost more than £100 – and I’m sure a lot of people buy expensive swiss watches based on brand, marketing and to impress other idiots at the golf club. Doesn’t mean you have to be one of those idiots to like wearing something nicer than a G-Shock though.
It costs 100 times as much as something that works better in every way. Doesn’t seem that great to me. If someone made a computer that cost fifty grand and only ran your programs when it felt like it, it wouldn’t sell.
Maybe not, but it doesn’t stop things like the Difference Engine no.2 being as fascinating to me as the millions of transistors in a modern CPU. It cost way more to build than 100 times what a pocket calculator does. But I’d still love to have one myself!