What a vampire priest taught me about watches.

Sometimes, you just have to let something you love go.

One of my recent netflix binges was a series called Midnight Mass. (Plenty of spoilers in this post, so maybe don’t read on if you’re planning on watching it).

The story is about a priest who inadvertently unearths a vampire while on a pilgrimage to the Middle East, and convinces himself that it’s actually an angel (despite the fact it kills him and drinks his blood, but hey, belief is a funny thing).

He decides to smuggle the vampire back to his island home town and then proceeds to slowly turn the rest of the town’s inhabitants into vampires.

It is only towards the end of the series that we discover his true motivation behind his actions. His secret love for a lady who was slowly succumbing to dementia.

Being a vampire heals all your ailments and gives eternal life, so he wished more than anything to save the woman he adored.

In the end, as vampires ravage his beloved town, he realises that it was not worth the cost.

And this has what to do with watches?

I have an increasing number of vintage watches in my collection, and the thoughts of endless servicing has crossed my mind and made me think about changing my collecting path.

I have always been of the opinion that once a watch enters my collection it is my responsibility to be it’s custodian and keep it well looked after, and that this includes servicing.

So as my vintage collection grows I keep doing the mental calculations on intermittent servicing of all these watches and it was starting to make me uncomfortable.

But at some point, is it time to just let go?

If a watch has no monetary or other value, there must reach a point when we just call it a day and accept the watch is at it’s end? That the cost of servicing at ever increasing intervals is just not worth it any more?

I really love wearing all of my vintage watches, so when the time comes for each of them, it is going to be a difficult decision to make.

Although few pieces in my vintage collection are worth more than £100, some of them are still quite unusual and rare pieces that I have never seen elsewhere. Some have also been obviously lovingly cared for before they came to me.

For example, one of my Bulova has an inscription on the back and markings on the inside of the case back showing it has been regularly serviced for a number of years.

Am I going to be the one who decides it’s no longer worth looking after when service time comes around?

I’m not so sure I could let it go quite yet….