Follow us at Geneva Watch Days 2021, starting right now with MB&F madness and Moser magic

Andrew McUtchen

At first it was so strange. And it had the drama, the inevitability, of a tipping point being reached. SIHH’s changed name. Basel stumbled, fell, then disintegrated into dust. COVID-19 hit, everything stopped. Then out of these ashes, Geneva Watch Days 2020 emerged.

I was unable to go, along with anyone from our Australian team, because travel was banned. Taken all together, this fairly rapid collapse of the watch fair world, was an entree of strange, followed by a main course of weirdness, rounded out by a dessert of international event desolation. I pictured it like those crumbling worlds in the Pixar movie Inside Out… Before our eyes, these mainstays, these events you could set your calendar too, lost all structural integrity, fell in on each other, and were gone. I calculated at a point, I’d done 14 SIHH into Basel trips in a row – rain, hail or child (my wife and I had three over this period!). I would never go again.

But the chaos did not stop us. The show did go on for Time+Tide, of course. We were able to send our European Editor, Mike Christensen to Geneva Watch Days, with our Amsterdam-based Creative Director, Marcus Flack. And now, a year later, as I watch on like I did in 2020, I have to agree with yet another sentiment in a Bruce Springsteen lyric: “You can get used to anything, sooner or later it just becomes your life.”

And while I look forward to rejoining the circuit, after a pit stop that will almost certainly stretch to years, for now, this is becoming normal. Time+Tide at a watch fair is now an international team of champions, from different backgrounds, coming together to share their talents, to spark off each other, to buddy up and get the absolute most out of what’s on offer. In this indomitable Aussie spirit, I present to you footage of our first day at Geneva Watch Days, 2021. Mike, Zach, over to you!