Almost all watch enthusiasts (and YouTube reviewers on a slow day) have given this one a thought at least once – what is the ideal apocalypse watch? A G-Shock? No, the battery will eventually run out. Something solar-powered, then? Perhaps, but what if the sun is blocked by a dust cloud from a cataclysmic event or if you simply cannot go outside due to radiation or brain-eating zombies? Maybe mechanical is the way to go. What about that Richard Mille boy-scout watch? Nah, even Sylvester Stallone flushed that turd at an auction. The point is, we all enjoy a bit of fanciful thinking and pondering moot “what if” scenarios, never expecting them to actually happen. And when the global pandemic kicked off, almost a year ago, life, as we know it, changed completely. The threat wasn’t of the brain-eating or alien-invading variety, but it has affected our lives in a profound way nonetheless. Fast forward a few months of media frenzy, constant lockdowns and cabin fever and I found myself ordering a little White Dial Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical, in an attempt to tip the scales of sanity back in my favor.

Now, the White Dial Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical needs no introduction – it’s been covered extensively (there are a couple of reviews on the site as well), so I’ll skip the spec-sheet and history lesson. The general consensus is that it’s a cracking little watch – and who am I to argue with that? This particular model was designed by Topper Jewelers and Hamilton (if “let’s change the dial color from black to white” is what passes off as design these days) and for a while, it was available only through said jeweler, making it rarer and more desirable for collectors.

Those times have passed though and now the White Dial Hamilton Khaki has become a part of the standard line-up of manual wind field mechanical watches. Not being a stickler for historical accuracy, I didn’t mind the lack of military provenance of the white dial – I actually find it more legible and visually appealing, especially the combination of crisp white dial, lacquered black numerals and creamy lume markers. I know I joked earlier about this being a new “design”, but the fact is that they weren’t lazy about it – every detail on the dial is done just right and works really well.

Between the lockdowns and the working from home, I faced a unique pandemic first-world problem – I wasn’t moving enough to power my automatic watches. I’d often find they had stopped during the night and the fact that most of them are divers didn’t help much either – unscrewing the crown to manually wind them every other day became tiresome after a while. Enter the White Dial Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical. Being a manual wind, this watch couldn’t care less how active my lifestyle was and with an 80(ish) hour power reserve, keeping it topped up was never a chore. Quite the contrary, actually – the tactile winding mechanism and oversized crown made winding the watch almost a zen-like experience. A short break from the hectic workday and something reassuring and familiar in these frenzied and uncertain times.

The truth is, it barely left my wrist from the moment I got it. And why should it? – it’s just the right size and weight to simply disappear on the wrist, versatile enough to go with just about anything, sufficiently rugged for everyday wear, completely independent of the fact that my lifestyle had become worryingly sedentary and on top of that – it actually keeps excellent time. And so, as our lives, hopes and dreams fundamentally changed in the year of the pandemic, so has my concept of the ideal apocalypse watch – it is, in fact, none other than the White Dial Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical.