One sign that Christmas is approaching is the appearance of jewelry ads. When The New Yorker magazine starts carrying ads on its back cover about watches every week, I know the holiday blitz is coming.
This week's back cover featured the Breguet Classique Hora Mundi watch, a beautiful timepiece. I have been considering a new watch for a little while -- mine, a Seiko, is more than 15 years old. I buy watches to last, but after awhile it is time for a new look.
So I thought, Brequet, probably out of my price range, but who knows? The New Yorker ad contained no hint of price, which should have been my first warning. Google told the truth: $89,700 for platinum, a mere $75,100 for rose gold. Hey, maybe they will go on sale after the holidays...
First, let me clear something up: I can't afford an $90,000 watch, in case you are wondering. But if I could, would I?
That took about 30 seconds of soul searching. No, 3 seconds. Not ever. Even if I were a billionaire, with virtually unlimited funds, I would never spend that kind of money on a watch. If someone gave a watch like that to me for free, I would give it back. Really.
There are, to use a cliche, two types of people in the world. Those who think 90 grand is fine to spend on a watch if you can afford it, and those who think no watch is worth that kind of money, not if the pope wore it, not if the Nobel committee gave it to them as a gift. I am in the second category. I only tolerate luxury up to a point (although to be fair my point is probably highter than a lot of people's), and beyond that guilt creeps in. There are so many better things to do with $90k.
Sentence of the Week
From that same New Yorker, an article by Emma Brockes on the British playwright Jez Butterworth:
One is aware there are words Butterworth uses partly because he finds them amusing: prannie, prannock, flapjack, Maypole, Chorleywood, pisshead, and accordion, among others -- words he picks up and saves like a magpie.
I had forgotten the legend about how magpies collect shiny objects and carry them to their nests. Brockes's comparison of Butterworth's language to a bird collecting shiny objects was illustrative and unexpected.
(It is, by the way, a legend. According to Science News, magpies do not collect shiny things.)