On winding, briefly

Procedure log: thirty-four turns, clockwise, before coffee. Duration: ninety seconds. Measurable output: none.

Thirty-four turns, most mornings, before anything else. The number is not a specification. It is what the 145.022 takes from stopped to firm, counted once out of curiosity in 2019 and never again, and the hand does it now without supervision.

The procedure has no defence. The watch it serves keeps worse time than the phone that wakes us and is less legible in the dark. It also needs this performed to work at all. That is a maintenance burden, not a feature, and anybody selling it to you as mindfulness is selling you something. Calibre 861 runs about forty-five hours unattended. Skipping a day is permitted by physics and forbidden by nothing except habit.

We went looking for a benefit and are obliged to report we did not find one. It does not improve the day. It does not settle the mind, and if it does, then ninety seconds of any deliberate action would do the same, and this one has the disadvantage of requiring a watch.

What it does do is establish that one object in our possession will not work unless we attend to it. There is exactly one such thing left in this office. Everything else charges overnight and asks nothing. We have noticed that we think about none of it.

Recommended daily. We cannot justify this recommendation and we are making it anyway.