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Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I want to describe a wristwatch that belonged to my grandfather, which my father now keeps in a drawer rather than wearing, mostly because it's slightly too fragile for everyday use these days. The family's had it for around seventy years — my grandfather bought it with his first proper wage after finishing an apprenticeship, apparently as a way of marking the fact that he'd actually made it into a stable job, which wasn't a given in his generation. It's a fairly plain thing to look at, a simple round face with a leather strap that's been replaced a couple of times, nothing that would catch your eye in a shop window. It belonged to him until he died, and then it passed to my father, who's kept it safe rather than in regular use, partly out of respect and partly, I suspect, because he's slightly afraid of damaging it. What makes it important to the family isn't really the object itself — a watch collector would probably tell you it's worth very little — it's that it's one of the few physical things left that my grandfather actually touched and used every day, so it carries this odd weight completely disproportionate to its actual value. Every so often my father takes it out and winds it just to keep it running, which feels less like maintenance and more like a small, quiet way of keeping a connection to somebody who isn't around anymore.