During my long break from this blog I had a birthday and since I was in Bangkok at the time I took the opportunity to buy myself (on behalf of another) a birthday present I had long wanted, a nice though not extravagant watch but simple and clean in design. The downside, or perhaps its best feature, is that it has only one hand so I have not only had to relearn how to read a watch but to do so slowly and deliberately, and to only be accurate to within five minutes. It is a good discipline and I do really like the simplicity of the watch and how it forces one to slow down, really look at the watch face, and acknowledge that one doesn’t need to know time to the nearest second or even minute.
Telling the time is one of the skills I’ve had for the longest, so it is clearly embedded in my bones. The single hand spreads across the diameter of the dial, rather than a radial hand pointing towards the time, so I sometimes read it as, for instance, 9.15 when it is actually 9.