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Philip Neal lost a watch. It was a watch he was fond of and had been told was like a 1930s Cartier. Instead of mourning its loss, he began to collect vintage watches that resembled it. And that's how became a watch collector. An eBay purchase led him to the Antique Watch Company watch repairers in Clerkenwell. The eBay purchase was a fake, but the friendship that grew between the buyer and the repairer of watches was not and the seed of an idea for a book was born.
The stories in ''Watchwords'' are not all about watches but they are inspired by them. Each is preceded by a photograph of the watch in Neal's collection that inspired it, together with a brief provenance and description. Neal is right: watches are fascinating! It's hard to pin the collection down - topics and themes are disparate and the tone ranges from dark and mysterious, through dry and comic, to deeply compassionate - but Neal himself comes through clearly in all of the stories. Autobiographical details from his life as a counsellor pop up and often site a story in a world view with an active and energetic interest in the human condition, with all of its ups and downs.
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