After many years of faithful service, my watch has gone wrong. It just chooses random moments of the day to display meaningless times which, speaking as the world’s most punctual person, is a nuisance. Especially as I shall now have to go to a shop and buy a replacement.

Yes, I know I could send it to the menders but, because I really am the most punctual person in the world, what am I supposed to do while it’s away? Use the moon? For me, going around without a watch is worse than going around without my trousers.

Of course I have a back-up. My wife bought it for me many years ago with her last salary cheque and it’s very beautiful. But sadly my eyes are now so old and weary that I can’t read the face properly. Which means I turned up to meet an old friend one hour late last week. And that, in my book, is ruder than turning up and vomiting on him.

It also brings me on to the biggest problem I’ve found in my quest to find a new timepiece. There’s a world of choice out there but everything is unbelievably expensive and fitted with a whole host of features that no one could possibly ever need.

I have flown an F-15 fighter and at no point in the 90-minute sortie did I think: “Damn. I wish my watch had an altimeter because then I could see how far from the ground I am.” All planes have such a device on the dashboard.

Similarly, when I was diving off those wall reefs in the Maldives I didn’t at any time think: “Ooh. I must check my watch to see how far below the surface I have gone.” Thoughtfully, God fitted my head with sinuses, which do that job very well already.

You might think, then, that my demands are simple. I don’t want my new watch to open bottles. I don’t want it to double up as a laser or a garrotte. I just want something that tells the time, not in Bangkok or Los Angeles, but here, now, clearly, robustly and with no fuss. The end.

But it isn’t the end. You see, in recent months someone has decided that the watch says something about the man. And that having the right timepiece is just as important as having the right hair, or the right names for your children, or the right car.

Over dinner the other night someone leant across to a perfect stranger on the other side of the table and said: “Is that a Monte Carlo?” It was, apparently, and pretty soon everyone there was cooing and nodding appreciatively. Except me. I had no idea what a Monte Carlo was.

Then we have James May, my television colleague, who has a collection of watches. Yes, a collection. But despite this he has just spent thousands of pounds on a watch made by IWC. Now I know roughly what he earns and therefore I know what percentage of his income he’s just blown on this watch and I think, medically speaking, he may be mad.

It turns out, however, that his IWC, in the big scheme of things, is actually quite cheap. There are watches out there that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. And I can’t see why.

Except of course, I can. Timex can sell you a reliable watch that has a back light for the hard of seeing, a compass, a stopwatch and a tool for restarting stricken nuclear submarines, all for £29.99. And that’s because the badge says Timex. Which is another way of saying that you have no style, no sense of cool and that you may drive a Hyundai.

To justify the enormous prices charged these days, watchmakers all have idiotic names, like Gilchrist & Soames, and they all claim to make timepieces for fighter pilots and space shuttle commanders and people who parachute from atomic bombs into power boats for a living. What’s more, all of them claim to have been doing this, in sheds in remote Swiss villages, for the last six thousand years.

How many craftsmen are there in the mountains I wonder? Millions, by the sound of it.

Breitling even bangs on about how it made the instruments for various historically important planes. So what? The Swiss also stored a lot of historically important gold teeth. It means nothing when I’m lying in bed trying to work out whether it’s the middle of the night or time to get up.

Whatever, these watch companies give you all this active lifestyle guff and show you pictures of Swiss pensioners in brown store coats painstakingly assembling the inner workings with tweezers, and then they try to flog you something that is more complicated than a slide rule and is made from uranium. Or which is bigger and heavier than Fort Knox and would look stupid on even Puff Diddly.

I think I’ve found an answer, though. There’s a watch called the Bell & Ross BR 01-92 which, according to the blurb, is made in Switzerland from German parts by a company that supplies the American military and is used regularly by people who make a living by being fired from the gun turrets of Abrams M1 tanks while riding burning jet-skis.

Who cares? What I like is that it’s very simple and has big numbers, but what I don’t know is whether it’s reliable and whether people laugh at you because of it at dinner parties. Anyone got one? Anyone know?

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