The Fourth Wheel, Issue 108

World exclusive interview: the one and only... Horological Dicktionary!

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that has had cause to ponder the giving, and taking, of offence over the last seven days. Not so long ago I quoted Jack Forster’s recent essay on luxury and Brutalism, specifically the common ground that both lack a sense of humour, and it is a point that has stayed with me. It is relevant, of course, to this newsletter’s main subject, an exclusive, world-first interview with the watch world’s memester general, the man known only as Horological Dicktionary, but it is something I think about most weeks, as I try to fulfil one of the founding principles of The Fourth Wheel: to encourage the watch industry (and those working in it) not to take itself, or themselves, too seriously. Most of the time, that aim is well-received, but being outspoken always carries an element of risk - especially without enjoying a cloak of anonymity - and sometimes you only find the line when you’ve already crossed it¹. To most of you, this might seem confusingly cryptic, and I’m afraid it’ll have to stay that way, but to a few I know it will make perfect sense. What I’d like to say is: thank you to all of my subscribers who believe in the importance of that risk! I really value your support. Now, on with the show.

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As a journalist, I’ve interviewed people in a number of unusual environments. One of the very first interviews I can remember doing was with lead singer of The Horrors, Faris Rotter (as he then called himself), crouched on some cramped, dirty stairs backstage at a gig.² It was a narrow, steep concrete staircase with a steady flow of people to let past, which meant I spent most of the conversation sat roughly level with his shoes and could barely hear a word he said. I’ve interviewed Usain Bolt over the phone, in a bar, from halfway round the world, and I’ve had to turn my face to the wall halfway through interviewing a famous actress when she quite suddenly disrobed to her naval³. I’ve done an interview where I wasn’t allowed to ask any questions that weren’t on the script, and I’ve interviewed a TV chef from the passenger seat of a Bentley. But until this week, I’d never interviewed anyone without knowing who I was talking to.

I can’t say exactly when, or why, I thought it would be a good idea to ask the guy who posts endless pictures of birds with crudely-photoshopped muscular arms and has developed a worrying obsession with Breguet’s ankles for his views on the watch industry, but I’m glad I did. Partly because no-one else has done it, and partly because (as I secretly suspected all along) behind the desire to relentlessly take the piss in quite a time-consuming manner, was an individual who clearly cared about the watch world and was quite eloquent in his views. Takes one to know one, I guess. So it was that earlier this week, I found myself in a South London churchyard, alone save for a couple of local substance enthusiasts, on a Zoom call (camera off, naturally) to horology’s primary provider of provocative, scatological and scathing humour. Here’s what he had to say.

The Fourth Wheel: Bearing in mind that we've agreed that you'll stay anonymous, my first question is: who are you?

Horological Dicktionary: A reasonable number of people in and around the industry do know my true identity. I'm not obsessively guarded about it, but I enjoy it, and it also affords you a little bit of protection as well. I have been interested in and involved in the industry for quite a long time, and that that's allowed me to gain a really good insight into what goes on, and also to have a good network of people that I can talk to. I don't exploit my account to attack people and to be really toxic; I'm anonymous because I like the messages that you can project. I think they project with more volume when you don't know exactly who they're coming from, and you can't quite guess how credible they are or not.

TFW: From the outside, it seems like some of your jokes land so well because they come very close to what industry insiders genuinely think about a brand or individual.

HD: For me the perfect meme has to find a balance between genuine insight and knowledge, and absurdity - stuff that has nothing to do with watches - and then deliberate misinformation as well. And I just love playing with that balance, because on the one hand with the following I have now I could use it to genuinely inform, or I could use it to just go for the low-hanging fruit of memes. 

horological_dicktionary

A post shared by @horological_dicktionary

TFW: Was there a point at which it surprised you that this had got quite big and quite well known? You've been doing it for what, 6, 7 years now?

HD: Something like that. It hasn't surprised me, to be honest, because I always knew that cynicism would sell more than vintage Rolex, for example. I've put in quite a bit of effort into posting on that account; it more or less took over how I was channelling my energy for horology for quite a while. The industry is utterly ripe for cynicism and mockery and a little bit of home truths and a bit of brutality - partly because it's culturally Swiss, I guess, and the way the industry is currently set up - but there's a profound absence of that. So I knew that it would be popular.

“I’m sure that there are quite a few people out there that… if they could push a button and delete my account, they would”

TFW: Do you have a personal social media profile as well?

HD: Yeah, I've got a personal account, I've got a watch related account, I've got the watch meme account. And for a while we had that ‘covert ops’ thing going, which was - I don't know how far back you go but we used to have a little army of people that was basically broccoli spamming and all of that stuff. I had four Instagram accounts I was bouncing in and out of, and I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Oh, shit! Did I post that to my personal account?’, or vice versa.

TFW: You worried you’d outed yourself?

HD: Exactly. I'd have to open Instagram just to double check, especially with the stories. I constantly post stories, and I'm surprised that I haven't screwed it up yet, to be honest.