“I was running a big company in Asia-Pacific and, in 2013, I was approached by a headhunter from a rival company. The process I went through to join them was quite lengthy. I spent months and months on it. If I remember correctly, there were nine or 10 interviews. But I got it. It was a consultancy role. I signed the agreement to start, but because of my position at the time, I had to serve out gardening leave and the non-compete [clause of my contract].

“There was a period of almost six months where I was just left to do nothing, you know? Then a month before the role was due to start, my new employer ended their offer. They broke the contract. I lawyered up, they got their lawyers involved… We went through a bunch of meetings trying to sort it out. We were going to go to court.

“Then, at the very last minute, they decided to settle. They gave me a pretty chunky cheque for the amount I sued them for. But I still wasn’t happy because I was faced with a lot of uncertainty and obviously going through that motion is quite complicated.

“So, I took part of that money and I went to Paris and I bought a vintage Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. I specifically remember thinking, ‘I’m buying this for this reason.’ I thought it was a very important event in my life and I bought the watch to remind myself of that.

“It was a good sum of money back then, for a vintage watch. And its value has gone up quite a bit. Of course, I still have it. How often I wear it depends on a bunch of things: who I’m meeting, what I’m wearing, where I’m having lunch. I only wear it if the occasion fits.

“I don’t tend to tell people the story because I signed an NDA on the settlement. What did I do with the rest of the money? I invested it in an electric car company, and that went up quite a lot. But I still refer to the Royal Oak as ‘the fuck-you watch’.”

– Jonathan, 54, city trader

“We were doing a project on our rented house in Bath, so we had to move all our stuff into storage for six months. We went back in January, opened up the unit and saw that some of the boxes were quite damp and rotten. The more we went through them, we found that more and more boxes were just trashed – all horrible and mouldy. There had been a leak in the storage facility, so it had flooded. We spent quite a while going through everything and adding up the costs. It was loads of books and personal items, quite a lot of stuff.

“The insurance claim took about three weeks to come through.

I’d always wanted a good watch, so it was nice to have a bit of money for once. I’d had my eye on a Tissot PRX for a while, but I didn’t really know too much about them. So we went into Bath and went around several watch stores, getting their recommendations and looking at different dials and trying on different straps. Then I purchased it online.

“It was sad to see a lot [of my personal things] go, but some of the stuff was things I’d never really look at again and would probably have thrown away eventually. So it was quite good, in a way, to get money from that. The watch will always remind me of what happened, definitely. It’s my first proper watch.”

– Will, 18, student

“I spent 12 years in corporate banking. I was pretty miserable by the end of it, particularly after lockdown. But it was one of those things that I thought I could never escape. I thought I was trapped in it for life. It was a well-paid role, but it was so boring. And the deeper you got into it, the harder it seemed to be able to get out.

“I’m a big, big watch fan – watch geek, some might call it. And, at the end of 2021, I managed to escape banking and start my own company, within the watch space.

“Things have started to go really well with it in the past year. So, this month, I bought a Parmigiani Fleurier to commemorate the fact that I’ve been able to step away from the day job and do my own thing, full-time. It was a purchase to mark that occasion, to celebrate and treat myself.

“A friend of mine had the 40mm Tonda PF Micro-Rotor, and I tried it on and fell in love with it immediately. They’re really special watches, the quality is incredible and the bracelets are amazing – they’re very, very comfortable. However, I’ve got quite a small wrist and I tend to prefer more mid-sized watches. So when they announced the Tonda PF Automatic, which is 36mm, I put my name down. When the opportunity came up [to buy it], I talked myself into it. “One of the great things about it is that it’s quite under-the-radar. It’s a real ‘if-you-know-you-know’ watch. It’s just something you can wear and enjoy for yourself, without any negative connotations. I mean, my wife kind of rolled her eyes.

“But it’s a special watch to mark the achievements this year. To be able to find a way out of doing a job I didn’t like and now do something I love is something I’m hugely grateful for. And it’s a subtle, personal reminder for me when I look down and see it on my wrist.

“I think of what’s been achieved and how far we’ve come since the miserable days of working 80-hour weeks from home during lockdown. It’s relief and it’s gratitude that it’s over. And a little bit of disbelief, really.

“Whenever you go through something like that and look back, it’s almost like it happened to someone else. Things can be very difficult at the time. But it’s a good lesson in life that you’ve got to keep going, stay optimistic and take advantage of other opportunities that come along. And things can improve.”

– James, 39, self-employed

“I’m nearly 50 now, but I was in my mid-twenties, working in New York, at an auction house, as a junior furniture specialist. It was a particularly bleak moment in my life, where I was feeling very low and particularly poor. I was a junior catalogue specialist up in the warehouse, where there’s no air conditioning in the summer – the New York City summer – just sweating myself to death.

“I would get there when they opened the doors at 6.00am and I would go through until they locked the doors at 6.00pm. I’d work weekends. That’s just what you have to do, to connect.

“A low-value jewellery sale came up. I think it was an institution [that had entered insolvency] that was constitutionally bound to sell off these objects, apparently of no value. One of them was this watch that was just listed as ‘watch’. Even though it said on the dial ‘Rolex’. But it wasn’t like any other Rolex I’d ever seen. The only Rolexes I was aware of were Daytonas and Submariners, because that’s what [Rolex] led with.

“I think the estimate was $100 to $150. Nobody else put a bid in. The minute I did, I thought, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ I bought it for $90 and I remember very well thinking, ‘How am I going to pay for this now?’ I was young and single and poor and I’d only just moved to New York. It’s a big bad city, and I was alone. And, you know, you can never have enough money to live in New York. So, it was definitely a stretch. I think I went without eating and drinking and maybe hopped a couple of turnstiles on the way to work for a while.

“The minute I got the watch, I was really proud of myself, though. It was this really wonderful, simple, stainless-steel Bubbleback. I’m 6ft, so it looks like it could be a ‘small dial’, but I put it on my wrist and I thought, ‘God, I love this watch. I don’t care if it’s real or not’. People would stop me and say, like, ‘That’s a really cool watch.’

“But it was still a great moment when a friend who’s a watch specialist said, ‘Oh no, that’s definitely right. That’s a great watch, and a great buy.’ I think he told me at the time it was worth around $1,000. Which just made me even more pleased with myself.

“Why wasn’t it in the auction for more money? I think it was just low-hanging fruit. The people there didn’t care. This was pre-, or early days, of buying online. So, it’s not like you had all this online activity searching for the word ‘Rolex’. And, anyway, nowhere in the description did it say ‘Rolex’. It was one of those moments where you had to be there to see the object. So, to get this thing, it was just affirmation that, as a young kid… maybe I do know something after all.”

– Sebastian, 47, auctioneer