Every Rolex tells a story, the ad goes. I’m assuming the one we heard this week about another make of watch is true. So wonderful a story it is, if it weren’t true we’d have to invent it. Maybe someone did, but that matters not one jot.
You will have heard the one about Muscat’s ‘on my watch’, and the inevitable comparisons with Tonio Fenech’s clock. Certainly the second doesn’t hold. There’s something about watches that clocks entirely lack. Many things, actually.
Certainly expensive watches bring to mind things like liquidity, cash purchases and money laundering – and, of course, Switzerland, the cosy home of it all. Equally symbolic is the fact that, while watch ads make much of the artisans who lathe away their snowbound winters to become sinjuri żgħar (‘the little rich’), in reality, most watch brands are owned by three mega-rich corporations that hold sway over the market.
I vividly remember the day I first realised that watches could be very expensive indeed. I was an impressionable 18-year-old in a summer job at a government department. It turned out that one of the clerks at the office was an acquaintance of a certain Midas called Tumas. Among other exploits, this Tumas had bought a watch for LM18,000. That’s hardly peanuts today; at the time, it got you ample foothold on the property ladder.
There’s a clear patriline here. The Muscat watch came from Yorgen Fenech, who got it from his father George, who was the son of Tumas. As another watch ad goes: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe – you merely take care of it for the next generation.”
There’s this thing about watches and fathers and sons and men generally. Watches tend to move down generations, from fathers or avuncular figures. The classic image is of a man taking his watch off his wrist and giving it to his son, who has come of age as a man in his own right. It’s a rite of passage beloved of novelists and filmmakers: who can forget Captain Koons’s monologue in Pulp Fiction?
Actual bloodlines aside, watches also move down the social layer-cake. They are given by the more to the less powerful; and if the other way round, the less powerful usually prove the point by teaming up. Since it’s the gift of a watch from powerful man to powerful man we’re talking about here, you have to wonder what it tells us.
The new era, we thought, would bring a new way of doing politics. That now sounds as fake as a Chinese Rolex
I love the idea of George Fenech buying up a stack of watches and squirreling them away to be dispensed over the years, as gifts of the family to those who mattered.
The Fenechs probably figured out that you never actually own a watch – you merely gift it to those who will take excellent care of the next generation.
In Pulp Fiction, it was the watch that brought the plot together. In Fenech Fiction, the watches (and heaven knows what else) suggest a plot that goes back decades, and that involves cheap seafront property, astonishing terms for energy contracts, building permits that appear where least expected, and such.
There are more pressing questions, too. For one, was the Muscat watch inscribed? Among the more admired backsides in watchland is that on a gold Rolex a Ms Monroe gave JFK in 1962. It’s inscribed “Jack – With love as always from Marilyn”. Joe and Jack work equally well, Marilyn and Yorgen perhaps not so much.
On the watch in question itself, it’s a Bvlgari BB33. I can think of others that would have lent themselves. Jaeger-LeCoultre, for example, make a rather famous watch called the Reverso Duoface. As the name suggests, it has two faces, and they can be flipped at a click depending on the occasion.
A Rolex President, too, would have done nicely. Technically, ‘President’ refers to a certain bracelet, usually in gold or some other noble metal, fitted to some models. Popularly, it means the kind of Rolex associated with the kind of statesman who does not normally bother with things like elections to stay in power, or who fancies himself a bit of an Invictus.
Wisely, politicians of a more democratic bent tend to steer clear. Even as he collected horological wonders in private, Bill Clinton wore pleb Timex watches in public. Putin, on the other hand, gets away with his Pateks and Breguets very much in public, but then that’s my point.
Still, Bvlgari it is. Now the brand has long struggled to be taken seriously as a watchmaker. Compared to the blue-hairspringed aristocracy, some watch snobs consider it – most unfairly, in truth – a fashion statement. Even so, this is no ordinary B33, but rather one of a special limited edition made to commemorate Malta’s accession to the EU. Printed on the dial are the two flags.
Which is fantastically ironic, because the feeling in the air when we joined the EU was that patronage would take a big dent: the new era, we thought, would bring a new way of doing politics.
That now sounds as fake as a Chinese Rolex, but maybe the Fenechs were making the subtle point that they would make hay under two flags as splendidly as they always had under one.
It’s also doubly ironic, because, in 2004, Joseph Muscat, the Super One radio host, was doing his best to keep those two flags separate. Had he had his way, George Fenech would have had to order a limited edition showing the flags of Malta and Switzerland in a Mediterranean setting, assuming the artisans at Bvlgari could work their tools around that.
Perhaps the worst thing about this watch is the bad timing. Yorgen Fenech could have kept it in the goodie safe a little longer, and it would have made a retirement gift fit for a king.