He checked his watch- forty minutes to go… His watch was a Casio, it was splash- proof, and it did exactly one thing, which was to tell the bloody time. This was another point of difference between him and guys these days. They all wore James Bond watches with separate chronometer dials, resistant to a depth of one thousand meters. What the hell did they think was going to happen to them? That they would be thrown clear from the high street stores where they worked and sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, from which they would swim clear only owing to their ability to time events to the split second? Those guys wouldn’t know a fraction of a second if it jumped up and denied them an Olympic medal. They had no concept of what could be won and lost in one. Time was wasted on this new breed of man who could spend a whole night with a woman and then upload it in less than a minute…
Chris Cleave, ‘Gold’, SimonandSchuster.com