I’m someone who’s always worn watches. As many who were born in the 80’s a wrist watch was the only way to be able to know the time, cellphones were rare and the watch was it. I spent my childhood years prior to turning 10 being really into digital Casios like most kids in my age group I had a calculator watch to cheat at maths, and really wanted one of those Casios that allowed you to remotely control tv’s (though my parents rightly saw some issues here), and then my tastes started to change around the time I got into double digits.

Around the time I turned nine or ten I started to prefer analogue watches, I couldn’t tell you what watches I had, probably some cheap offerings from Swatch. I stuck with cheaper analogue watches throughout my teen years and 20’s with maybe having a couple of watches, one cheap watch that I could beat up, and another cheap “dressier” watch. As someone who moved around a lot as a kid generally moving countries every 2 years or so, collecting anything didn’t really occur, then I got married, settled in Sweden and turned 30 in 2014 when my wife gave me a wonderful gift, my first mechanical watch.

My first mechanical watch was a 125th Anniversary Edition Certina DS80 Powermatic. This watch is a beautiful piece and I was really taken with the display caseback. After this my interest in watches was well and truly piqued and I started paying a lot more attention to watches, though I wouldn’t have called myself a collector or even a true enthusiast just someone who liked watches and kept a couple. And then the pandemic hit in 2020.

Obviously the pandemic hit all of us hard, my youngest child was born in January of that year and the first few months were tough. Then in August of 2020 I contracted Covid. The virus hit me hard I lost 10kg in a week (and I wouldn’t have said I was overweight) and developed breathing difficulties, debilitating headaches and other issues that meant in the fist six months of having Covid I dropped 20kg and my full weight loss after 2 years was 30kg, and I was in the emergency ward at our local hospital relatively often. All of this meant I couldn’t work full time from August 2020-March 2024, also reading was difficult and I had issues watching screens for too long. This led me to finding watch youtubers such as TGV, Just One More Watch and others. This sparked a resurgence of my interest in watches as well as giving me an outlet. And why independent watch brands? Mostly because I found that I got more watch for my money that way, but one issue I had was I could not try on most of these watches and information was often sparse, and this led to me creating my Swedish_brit Instagram profile (hence my logo) and making this blog. Now I’m thankfully back at work full time and I do have my family so I’m sure my posts won’t be too regular but I’ll try to keep it up as much as possible.