For a TL;DR, skip to the end 🙂

Although many people say this nowadays, I truly mean it – I have been into watches since I was a child! To be precise, it began around the time I started primary school.

At that time, it was just an obsession with the watch as a ‘gadget’ more than a device to tell time – this coincided with the rise of Casio’s calculator watches, fuelling my desire for even cooler gadgets. I then discovered Timex and their ‘indiglo’ backlight – loved that, and my love for lume continues to this day. To bridge the gap between the quartz and mechanical watch transition, I have an old story about my father and his Patek Philippe, but I will save that for a full post someday. 

Having lived in Africa until 2010 – I didn’t ever consider the wider watch community on the internet, and I just sort of ‘collected’ on my own… the concept of a Redbar-style watch meet-up in a place like Johannesburg is nothing short of insane… because that is tantamount to asking for trouble aka. armed robbery!

In 2018,  Adrian from Bark & Jack posted a YouTube video and it fortuitously came up in my feed… I clicked on it – since I loved watches anyway… and have since become slightly obsessed with the online watch family – the #watchfam as it is referred to on Instagram.

So I started posting wrist shots and photos of watches on Instagram – quite randomly I might add – and friends and family seemed to be confused… “What’s with all the watch pictures?” … “Are you selling watches now?” … “Are you a watch blogger?”.

Why not, I thought…

I toyed with the idea of posting videos of watches and/or reviewing watches… I even tried making a video once (it was horrible)! I don’t have big plans to grow an audience on YouTube, as I prefer to write out my thoughts and have detailed conversations – YouTube content, for me, doesn’t scratch that itch. 

If you look through my blog archives at www.screwdowncrown.com you will see some of the random content I used to share via email with friends, family and colleagues – I figured I would share it on my blog instead, and have a nice archive of my shared content in one place for my offspring to read someday!

Finally, during the pandemic, I started studying psychology and philosophy, which was a general interest of mine – this, as it turns out, was a very useful lens with which to analyse the watch collecting hobby… and many posts later, it seems that many fellow watch collectors agree!

So – TL;DR time 🙂 This blog is about watches and watch collecting … and connecting the hobby to some philosophy and psychology… along with my own opinions just to spice things up!

I hope you enjoy it.

All my best,
F. aka @kingflum

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PS. You can follow my watch journey on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/kingflum/ 

If you have any suggestions, comments or queries… or simply want to have a chat, feel free to contact me at any time.