The watch that started it

My grandmother had one drawer nobody was allowed to open. Not because there was anything valuable in it — there wasn't — but because it was hers.

She died the year I turned twenty-six, and my mother posted me a small box to my flat in east London, the one with the radiator that only worked in summer. Inside was a gold watch. Oval case, a bracelet of tiny links gone soft from forty years of wear, and hands that had stopped somewhere in 1974 because nobody had thought to wind it since.

I wore it to work that Monday and three people asked about it. Not nice watch — they asked about it. Where it came from. Whose it had been. A thing nobody had manufactured in half a century was doing something nothing else I owned could do.

So I started looking for more. Markets in Bermondsey on cold Friday mornings. Estate sales in Kent. A very patient dealer in Antwerp who let me handle pieces I had no business affording. And what I learned is that watch design has a memory. The marquise case existed for about a decade and then vanished. Colour arrived on women's wrists at the end of the sixties and left again by 1980. Every shape belongs to a year — and once you know the year, you know something about the woman who wore it.

The trouble with real vintage is that there is exactly one of each, it costs more than it should, and half the time the movement is dead on arrival. I know, because I bought a lot of dead movements.

So we build them instead. Every GLOIA is drawn from the year it is named after — the case shape, the dial, the proportions, the way it sits on a small wrist — with a movement that actually keeps time and a five-year warranty standing behind it. Not a copy of one particular watch. A copy of a moment.

I still wear the 1974. It still doesn't run. I've never had it fixed and I don't intend to.