Luxury watch-owning friends of mine are always put out by how much it costs to service a mechanical watch. The tone is always the same. “I spent £5,000 on this watch three years ago, took it back in for a check-up, and they want £500 for a service. Five-hundred quid! That can’t be right. Can it?” Well, yes. It can. And depending on the watch, it can be a lot more than that too. Servicing a mechanical watch, even a simple one, is the hidden cost of ownership. Because it’s so much more expensive than people expect, watch servicing provokes moral outrage, like a stealth tax. It creates that same feeling of powerlessness, too. “If I don’t get it serviced,” those same friends fluster, “they say my watch might stop – and that would cost even more to sort out. How am I going to explain that to my wife when I’ve promised her a week in Tuscany next summer?!” etc. I can understand this. The first time you come face to face with the realities of watch servicing it does feel like someone’s pulled the wool over your eyes. With a car – so often a watch comparable – you know you have to pay to get your brake light fixed, because if you don’t, you might get arrested. You also know that if you don’t replace your tyres, you’re playing Russian roulette with your life. But it’s different with a watch. Unless you’re negotiating with Columbian drug smugglers, a watch is almost certainly not going to save your life. There’s no gun to your head obliging you to pay for a service. And you wouldn’t be the first to eschew coughing up another cash-wad if you chanced it – there’s always your phone, after all. This, though, is where owning a mechanical watch is very different to owning a car, and much more like owning a dog. (A dog with pedigree, obviously.) It’s a responsibility. It asks something of you. Not as much as a smartwatch – that would make it an irritant. And you get back what you give. Patek Philippe’s now 20-year-old strapline (that ‘you never actually own a watch…’) may over-romanticise watch ownership, but the point about you ‘looking after it for the next generation’ isn’t only fluffy marketing. Tend to it properly, and a proper watch will be something your children’s children remember you by. My grandfather died 20 years ago, but I still have his Rolex.