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I bet you think this page is about you, don't you?
He walks into the bar of his private club places his Louis Vuitton wallet down with his American Express card adjusts his cuffs so everybody can see his cufflinks and his watch (£3,000 retail he says but who pays retail? It's an investment) and orders drinks all round. Somehow at the end of the evening his bill comes to a lot more than he expected. Has somebody been taking advantage of him? Has somebody been taking the piss?
Don't get me wrong, I like the guy. Most people do, in a strange way. Everybody has got a good word for him. OK, admittedly it's often wanker, but that's a start isn't it?
Of course it's jealousy. The guy is 21, has the look of James Bond's younger brother and he lives in a penthouse bachelor pad. If he's got a mortgage at all it never seems to present him with a problem. When he gets his driving licence back he's probably going to be driving a silver grey Audi something or another and he'll probably go back to selling cars. He has a certain affinity with cars, having claimed to have been conceived in the back of a stolen Morris Minor Traveller I suppose that's understandable.
Who would have thought that three pints of Stella Artois
would have put him over the limit? Apart from people who've ever read
the label or drunk the stuff, obviously.
Now he's spending some months in life's bus lane.
He's got a watch. A huge chunk of Swiss cheese. A Breitling Chronomat Blackbird with tachymeter (what's that? He doesn't know either). You know the sort of thing, it can withstand temperatures and pressures that would kill its wearer. A lot of pilots wear them.
He'd really look the part as a pilot. Have you ever noticed certain people seem to be wearing a uniform no matter what they are dressed in? He looks like he's wearing a pilot's uniform.
I assume you know the difference between God and a pilot? God doesn't think he's a pilot.
He's been training for it. “I took Concorde to Moscow last night” he says. Microsoft Flight Simulator. What kind of people play with Flight Simulator? Don't answer that.
I wonder if he's ever flown his Learjet to Nova Scotia? Never mind.
He told me his watch cost him £300 to service. I told him that all the watches I have ever owned or ever will own would not come to £300 worth. Servicing a watch? What for? My watch needs a new battery when it stops. When it stops keeping accurate time it is time to get a new watch.
Of course he says his watch is an investment, he could easily sell it, and it might even fetch more than he paid for it. That's very reassuring. It must give him a real sense of security to be alone waiting at a bus stop with a watch on his wrist which can easily be sold and can raise enough to live on for two or three months, buy a reasonable second hand car or get smacked or coked out of your head for a week.
The ultimate irony came when the Radio Four pips sounded. I looked down at my Accurist (probably about £60 retail) and it was absolutely spot on. His watch was three minutes slow. Ah but he'd not had time to set it properly as he took it out of his safe. (My watch spends the night on my bedpost) He hasn't one of those devices - I go from ignorance to fully understanding a hypothetical device in one second flat - an artificial wrist to wind up your self-winding watch?? Wow. You'd think most of the wankers who owned them would be in danger of overwinding them.
That wasn't the first time I had come across the phenomenon of the expensive watch keeping bad time. Many years ago my boss said her watch told the right time because her Rolex was more expensive than mine. At the time mine was a Casio which was more accurate than its quoted accuracy of +/-30 seconds per month, I reset it by the radio time signal whenever it strayed away from perfect accuracy beyond my own ability to hit the button at the right time, which was about 8/100ths of a second. There is nothing that winds me up more than being uncorrected, apart from perhaps being uncorrected by somebody whose confidence in their own superior knowledge is based on bullshit. |
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