A common talking-point in the watch community is the start of the watch-addiction. Often people then refer to their father, who owned at least one memorable watch. Well, this was not the case with me. My father bought his watches in the department store. I actually remember, that my mother did send me out as a young man to buy a watch for my father’s birthday … “You like watches, your taste is better than mine” … so I got him a cheap quartz bicolor watch, which he did actually wear every single day from this birthday on, until he passed away.

My first contact with watches really only was the catalogue of a mail order company. (You remember?! Amazon’s business model is actually nothing new, it’s 100 years old; the only real difference is, that you ordered via a postcard!) I remember my brother and me (especially in the weeks before Christmas) browsing through the catalogue for ages. Mainly in the watches section. There was the Pulsar LED watch which we admired, but most watches in this portfolio were actually cheap ones produced in eastern Germany by GUB in Glashütte (which was privatized after the reunion and is the brand Glashütte today) and marketed using funny brand names to get hard western money into the socialist economic system. But from those days on I was kind of interested in watches, however, just as a fashion element. I remember, that as a student I even wore a plastic digital watch in the shape of a crocodile. A chick magnet!

Later I could afford Braun quartz watches and the Chromachron, which I described here earlier. In my early days after university I was traveling a lot for business, and the love of watches was accompanied by the love of London. Therefore the guys from the band I was (and still occasionally am) playing in, got me something special for my 29th birthday (the worst birthday ever, getting “nearly 30” made me feel really old …): a STORM London watch, engraved with their initials (and thankfully the date, so I can recap this story now)! This was cool!

Only a few years later I found a Heuer Chrono on a small flea market in Paris – from then on only mechanical watches were allowed on my wrist. On Instagram the other day, I got an ad from STORM and I visited their homepage. To my surprise, they still offer my watch after nearly 30 years … and they even call it «new», so if nothing else, it certainly is a lasting design! https://stormwatches.com/new-blast-blue/ They even developed it further, the actual watch has a proper clasp instead of the extremely simple (but functional) one on the original.

So what is the STORM (new) blast blue (apart from being a blast)? It’s a contemporary 38mm cylindric case with a glass nearly as thick as the rest of the cast and iced, so that you can hardly read the time. The bracelet is maybe the coolest part of the watch, it looks and feels slightly like handcuffs. It has a (Japanese) quartz movement and is 5 bar waterproof (which means the case construction is better than that of an IWC Portugieser chrono). But all of this doesn’t really matter: it is a nice memento which I wear when I meet the boys – this time I absolutely agree with the manufacturer’s claim on the homepage: New Blast is a true statement.