Each watch is entirely hand- made - cogs springs the lot
Each watch is entirely hand- made - cogs, springs, the lot.Clued-up punters can pay up to 40 per cent less by shopping around. Christies buy hundreds of brand-new gold Oysters every year, many given as presents to mistresses. They buy these dismissed love tokens for about pounds 3,000, then sell them on for about pounds 4,000 to traders, who make a quick profit selling them on again to people who really want a heavily discounted, brand-new gold Rolex.RarityRolex refuses to say how many Oysters are made, but production is reckoned to be about half a million a year. Philippe Patek ("the true Rolls-Royce of watches", according to Christies, which compares a Rolex to a Rover) makes just 15,000 watches of all types in the same time.
Of course, not all Oyster watches are made in the Rolex factory: hundreds of thousands of fakes are sold on street corners all over the world. These are considered perversely chic by those who consider the real thing to be vulgar.Oyster crimeA spate of Oyster crime hit London last year. Alexandra Heseltine, 28, was robbed of her pounds 8,000 Oyster, a wedding present from her husband, in a west London car attack. Lisa Sachs, 35, a "part-time interior designer", was knocked to the ground by two heavies in Hampstead, who took her pounds 4,000 Oyster, also a wedding present from her husband. A female BBC executive had her pounds 15,000 Oyster snatched from her at a roundabout in Shepherd's Bush.Police have no statistics for Rolex crime, but Rolex's rival, Cartier, got into the act when former Page Three girl, Jilly Johnson, had her pounds 5,000 Cartier Panthere forced from her wrist at traffic lights in west London. It was widely assumed by the press to be a Rolex Oyster - the generic for an expensive watch.
I am a size 14 I have been a size 14 for years. I have no idea what size 14 means in terms of inches but in practice it means I am two sizes fatter than a model (size 10) and one size thinner than a specialist fat lady (size 16 and above). It's not something I feel fabulous about, but neither is it a source of self-hate sessions in the bath It's something I've come to terms with. And now, after a major shopping trip, I've discovered I'm actually an 8! All these years teetering on the edge of specialist fat lady, and now I'm too thin to be a model! I am struggling to rebuild my moral universe. Sort of. My day starts with a nightmare hunt for a wedding outfit. A suit is out of the question (too exec), trousers impossible (aged aunt factor), I look terrible in separates so it has to be a below-the-knee dress Which leaves me, eventually, at Next, in the polka dot zone.
So off I trot to the changing rooms with, naturally, a size 14.Annoyingly, I can't do the buttons up across my chest The dress has obviously been mislabelled. So I have to get changed, give the assistant a plastic school card designed to ensure I won't steal anything, and find a stigmatising size 16. The size 16s are hidden at the back of the rack, in sad, don't-look-at-me brown. Frankly, brown isn't me, but the wedding is tomorrow, so it's do-or-die. Then I queue for another plastic school card, get changed, try on the dress Which is pretty tight, but 16 is as big as they go.