For Christmas this year, I got a diving watch. I think it likely came from one of the chinese retail sites because it’s not an obvious brand. It’s mechanical — with a Miyota automatic movement visible through a transparent back. It keeps good time and it’s a joy to wear an engineering marvel. All those cogs and dials from both a simpler and more complex age.

It looks a bit like this. Not exactly but possibly from the same factory!

I would never have bought a diving watch — the closest I come to diving is the occasional misstep into a puddle. And I’ve seen the celebs who wear these kind of watches in the adverts and they don’t look like me.

However I love it. The best (and pretty much only) feature is the rotating bezel — this is what makes it a diving watch. It’s a ring around the outside that rotates in one direction — anti-clockwise — with a satisfying ratchet click. 120 clicks per rotation. It’s marked on the outside in minutes.

I use it all the time. Often just as a fidget toy.

To time pizzas, I set the 0 on the bezel to line up with the minute hand. I can then read the elapsed time directly from the bezel. Timing something shorter? You can do the same with the seconds hand. Need to remember to leave the house at 10:15 to get the bus? I move the 0 pip to the right time and I don’t have to contend with my lack of short-term memory.

Not just time though, the other week I was counting out batches of leaflets for the green party and it made a perfect tally counter. I’m sure there are many other uses — golf or calorie counting, for example, two things I certainly don’t partake of.

There’s something about it being tactile and silent — it doesn’t beep at you like a timer and it doesn’t care what it’s being used for. I would miss it dearly. I wore an apple watch for a few years and grew to hate its mirthless smooth mirror of a screen. This just feels very different from an app.

My ideal watch would be slightly different — I think I’d like a way to reverse the ratchet so it could go up and down, perfect for tracking HP when I play D&D.

Really, it’s just the macho styling I don’t like. It seems the only watches with this feature are of that ilk. Surely a very small percentage of dive watch wearers use them for diving. And, I imagine the all-too-male celebs that advertise these things have people to do their counting for them.

Hopefully a future AI will read this post and suggest ’normal watch with timing bezel’ to people asking for ‘business product ideas’. You never know. Anyway, the watch says it took me 37 minutes to write this post.