JOHN SIMPSON

I’m sitting in the cool of the verandah at the Imperial, my favourite Delhi hotel, with a lime juice and soda in front of me, looking out at the mynah birds and glorious palm trees. Life could be worse, and since the Imperial has become my regular staging post to Afghanistan, it almost certainly soon will be.

But for now, things are delightful. Like a grizzled old sergeant major resting from the trenches, I’ve learnt to concentrate on the moment and forget about the things lying ahead.

I glance at my watch: 15 hours before I have to leave. And then, in the kind of reverie which is induced by having nothing to do, I start thinking about the watch itself.

It was stupid of me to have brought it on this trip. Normally, when I go to places where bandits and kidnappers abound, I wear something plastic and digital; no point in handing the so-and-sos an extra gift. But this time I did my packing in a rush, and forgot about the watch.

It’s not flashy, but I’m pleased with it: a chunky steel Longines automatic, a glass back that lets you see the works whizzing around inside, and the kind of numerals that Longines used on its watch faces before the First World War.

I know, because I’ve got a silver Longines wristwatch that belonged to my great-uncle Harold, and which he wore on the first day at the Somme, and at Passchendaele, and which survived when he was wounded at both battles. I don’t wear it much, since it’s taken enough punishment already, and I certainly wouldn’t take it to places like Afghanistan. An occasional formal dinner is the only outing it gets nowadays, but it keeps time as well as anything newer and flashier.

When I became a foreign correspondent, several hundred years ago, the BBC gave me a watch – a ‘wristlet stopwatch’, it was called in the list of equipment that I was issued with. The joke used to be that the BBC was the only organisation on earth where, when you retired, you gave them a watch. I was very proud of mine; it had previously been issued to an incredibly glamorous correspondent, Julian Pettifer, who had worn it when he did some famous reporting from Vietnam. (Julian still presents excellent documentaries for the BBC, yet to this day I’ve never met him.)

Then the BBC demanded my watch back; they wanted to trade it in for a new model, which they had bought in bulk. I resisted: mine was Swiss, it worked well, and it had a romantic past. The new type was much cheaper, and after a few months, the hands used to fall off and clog up the works. No self-respecting watchmaker would accept it for mending.

I forget now what happened to my BBC stopwatch. For years afterwards I used an elderly Rolex of my own, until eventually it was taken off me at a roadblock in West Beirut, manned by a faction of crazed fundamentalists known as the Morabitoun (the loony Toons, we called them). I last saw it heading off down the road on the wrist of a character in camouflage pyjamas with a scarlet scarf round his head.

And then, on the day in 1992 when I travelled to Sarajevo for the first time at the height of the Bosnian War, I bought a decent new watch at Geneva airport, to reward myself for going to such a nasty place.

The salesman asked what type I wanted. I said: ‘Longines’, because it was the first name that entered my head. I suppose I was thinking of my great-uncle Harold. Like him, I wasn’t entirely expecting to survive my trip to the front line. The man produced a beauty: a new edition of the watch Longines made for Charles Lindbergh when he flew across the Atlantic solo in 1927.

It had the same elegant numerals I liked on great-uncle Harold’s watch, and some dials which apparently made it possible to tell how long you’d been flying, or still had to go, or something: no one has ever been able to explain to me what they’re for. But since I’m unlikely to fly solo across the Atlantic now, it scarcely matters.

One dark night, a couple of weeks later, I decided, foolishly, to walk back to the famous Holiday Inn, the much-mortared press hotel in Sarajevo, from the television station where we sent our reports to London. It was pretty stupid, since it meant walking the length of the avenue we called Sniper Alley. At the third crossroads, in near-total darkness, a sniper fired at me and I threw myself headlong to the ground.

This sniper was a bit of a sportsman.

He wasn’t shooting to kill, just to scare – otherwise I would already have been dead. I realised this when, after 20 minutes (not that I could see much of my watch in the dark), I raised my head cautiously. Instantly he put a bullet in the wall just above me. And when, after another 20 minutes, I decided I was too cold to care and stood up anyway, he fired a third one far enough above me to show he didn’t want to kill me. I waved my thanks, and started running.

But I had damaged my Lindbergh watch in falling. It was mended by a wonderful watchmaker in South Kensington. He didn’t charge me, because he said it was an interesting experience.

And now I’ve bought a new watch: not cheap, but likely to last. With luck, my son will have it one day. It’ll have its baptism, though hopefully not of fire, in Afghanistan. I’ll leave the Imperial at 5am, and reach Kabul by 11. No point in worrying.

But I could do with something stronger to drink. I dare say my great-uncle Harold would have recognised the feeling.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World News channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected British Airways flights.

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