Small mysteries of the world #1
The watch pocket.
After getting a lovely antique silver Swiss pocket watch for my birthday – a non-functioning watch minus its minute hand – I finally got it back from the repairers last week.
This made me wonder about how I was going to wear it. I had an Albert watch chain for it, but surely I would need to get a couple of waistcoats? I certainly couldn’t carry it in my jeans pocket along with my keys – they’d destroy it in no time.
I’d almost resigned myself to wearing a waistcoat for the rest of my life, when I noticed something strange about my jeans: they had a separate little pocket above the right hand pocket which was just the right size for a pocket watch. Bizarre!
Further investigation showed that all my trousers had a hitherto unsuspected watch pocket, just the right size and just the right distance from the zip so that the bar of the watch chain could go through the button hole.
This is excellent! I can wear my fob watch and not alter my wardrobe at all. But why on earth do all jeans come with watch pockets, when everyone gave up wearing pocket watches decades ago, and never wore them with jeans anyway?