AS soon as I read the news this week I knew that the subject of the piece was for me, the perfect accessory after a near lifetime of searching. For a long time I have silently demonstrated token resistance to being part of the rat race by refusing to wear

AS soon as I read the news this week I knew that the subject of the piece was for me, the perfect accessory after a near lifetime of searching.

For a long time I have silently demonstrated token resistance to being part of the rat race by refusing to wear a watch.

Just about everybody does have one wrapped round their wrist like half of a set of handcuffs so I proclaim my freedom from convention by going without a mechanical device showing the passing of time.

I admit that laziness may have been the spur for this practice - when I began wearing watches as a child I was forever forgetting to wind them up so invariably they were wrong - apart from twice a day - because they were stopped.

The advent of battery-powered watches did not make things much better. They worked for a while but inevitably the battery ran down and I could not be bothered to replace it. So I gave up the things altogether.

I don't miss out. There are clocks all over my house - I think one of them actually shows the correct time - and wherever you go indoors in shops and offices and out there are others to remind us of where we are in the day.

Maybe I do secretly hanker after being like the rest of the population and wear a watch but I have stuck to my resolution.

Now, however, there is a solution to my dilemma. Just on the market is a new kind of watch. Quite why no one thought of it before I don't know, but this one does not tell the time.

But it is not useless. Ingeniously, the face is divided into two parts. A dark half shows that it is night and a lighter half lets you know it is day. Incredible. It saves all that bother of looking around you.

Another astonishing thing about this Day & Night watch is the price. It has a crocodile skin strap, is encrusted with sapphires and is made from steel salvaged from the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic (you can tell by the rust).

It's a snip at £150,000 and, understandably, the limited edition sold out within 48 hours.

The Swiss company which made the watches describes the buyers as "very rich clients, who have taste for the luxurious".

It claims that the watch offers "a new interpretation of time, an avant-garde approach that is different and even disturbing".

The chief executive was quoted as saying "Anyone can buy a watch that shows time, but only a discerning customer can buy one that doesn't."

Discerning is not the word I would have used.

The story has inspired me to come up with my own unique chronological masterpiece, a subtle variation of the day and night theme.

I'm calling mine Awake & Asleep; if you can see it you know instantly that you are in the land of the living and if you can't you are in the land of nod. I think I'm on to a winner.