October 20th, 2023 | Words and photography by DAHTT
I've never been so happy to say goodbye to a watch.
Why I'm glad to see the back of this Seiko SJW041.
I bought this Seiko on eBay a few years ago. It was to be my beater/grab and go quartz. 100m water resistance and a sapphire crystal can be quite hard to find at a price point suitable for a beater.
Eventually I replaced it with a quartz Grand Seiko and my Smiths W10 reissue became my beater. For a while this budget friendly Seiko sat in a drawer keeping near perfect time in the darkness, with no real purpose. That was until some traumatic events were to take place which for a short time would make this watch the most important time telling device in our home.
For several months this watch sat poised on a shelf, like a fold out travel alarm clock, with a piece of masking tape underneath it with "Rach & Iain time" scrawled across it.
Our recently married close friends had been traveling through Vietnam and we'd been receiving daily text updates of their adventures. One morning we awoke to a string of messages:
"Iain feels a bit sick.
We're cancelling the boat trip.
He's fitting.
Called an ambulance.
We're at the hospital, they've found a tumor in his brain. He has pneumonia too!
He's fallen into a coma..."
What was supposed to be a short trip through Vietnam to celebrate their wedding, ended up resulting in our friends living out there for months, while the amazing doctors removed the tumor from Iain's brain.
Our only link to Rach was via messages and the occasional call when she had the energy, and this little Seiko was a part of the chain of communicating with her every single day.
Never before has a watch I've owned performed such an important task. It kept us talking to Rach. I don't know how many thousands of times it was looked at to see if it was an appropriate time to text or call. But during those months I vowed that when Iain made it home I would give him this watch.
For a long time when we just wanted to see the pair of them, all we could look at was this watch, waiting for it to be the right time to ask for an update.
Iain has been back in the UK for a few months now. Tomorrow is the first time he's been well enough to come and visit us. Tomorrow is the last time I'll look at this watch because he'll be leaving with it.
I've never been so happy to say goodbye to a watch.