Time on my hands: Fossil watches at John Lewis

The Piccadilly station clock signals 5 minutes before rush-hour...

I’ve been on the hunt for a new watch. It’s hard to always read the time on my once trendy, but now slightly scratched, Storm watch with a blue face which has done the job for some considerable time. 

Looking around shops and online made me think of the many watches I have had over the years. In fact it led me to waste time, a happy hour reminiscing on all those watches which had adorned my left wrist over the decades. 

I want something stylish and practical which is easy on the eye and also easy to tell the time at a glance. A watch that is elegant enough to see me through meetings I have around college and the north-west in general but which will also inform me of the Cinderella hour when I am living it up at a gig or bar in the Northern Quarter. 

I searched in department stores and on Deansgate, in the jewellry shops of King Street and even ventured into the Arndale Centre, but all to no avail. Exasperated, over a coffee in North Tea Power a friend mentioned that John Lewis sell watches. I’d forgotten about John Lewis- as it’s not in the city centre but out in the furthest of Manchester’s southern suburbs in Cheadle Hulme. 

So on an afternoon when the hail in Hale stopped my sowing of seeds in the vegetable patch, I went shopping instead. I ended up finding some timepieces I liked and have narrowed it down to two of the fossil watches at John Lewis. There were 17 in the ladies' range and I don’t know whether to go for the Georgia Glitz or possibly the Stella Glitz. (I sense a slightly worrying bling pattern in my taste here…) The men’s range looked quite varied too, so that might solve a birthday present problem I have looming later in the year. 

So it looks like a watch with a “glitz” in the title may soon be joining a select band of time pieces that I have owned. I fondly remember the orange face of my very first watch as a teenager and the fact that it supposedly could be worn underwater. I never did put that to the test. I then succumbed to the 1980s digital watch craze, with a couple of watches which I am sure were en vogue at the time. 

But my strongest memory of purchasing a watch came in Malaysia in the 1990s. Having walked to the top of a hill on Penang in humid conditions, we came across a local lad with a tray full of watches. His sales pitch won me over: “Genuine imitation watches” he cried. Top marks for honesty, kind of. It was the only time I've ever bought a genuine imitation watch; I fell for the novelty value of its Chinese numerals and it lasted me for years.