So girls, what fair maiden doesn't fall hopelessly in love with a man who has the ability to instantly calculate a 15% tip for dinner on his watch? Oh, not that many then. And if she didn't go for that you could always turn the calculator face upside down and spell HELLO out for her with the numbers. Come on, how could you not be impressed with 007 waking up to the beep on that 'Hamilton Pulsar P2 2900 LED digital timepiece after bedding a beauty or two in 'Live and Let Die'. Or what about good old Roger Moore's Seiko model 0674 Satellite tracker, with built - in ticker tape printer of messages from base for the next mission! Surely his Seiko m354 Memory Bank 'Plastique Explosive' from 'Moonraker' or the Seiko G757 from Octopussy with built in camera and tracking device made your legs go to jelly? How can you not love a man with technology on his arm? You would never tell Connery is a geek and loser. Well Roger, maybe.

In the 1980s, due to movies like the Bond franchise, digital watches were the thing to have for real blokes (you never saw girls wear them) and we would all be twiddling away with the buttons like girls do today with mobile phones. Even Terry McCann from Minder wears one. We could dive to 50 meters in the ocean without the glass face cracking (although our face and lungs would burst at 25m), or take the temperature on top of a mountain top or in the heart of the desert if we so choose, or just time ourselves doing laps of the track to impress the girls in our birthday suit. But in the 1990s the whole digital watch thing became naff and Bond went back to the classic Omega face, very nice time pieces indeed, digital watches absorbed by the coming mobile phone revolution.

I currently wear a simple Sekonda timepiece, gold metal finish with a white classic face. But in every mans top draw where they keep their socks, pants and love letters lurks Casio digital watch, lonely, strapless and battery less in the corner by your condoms and Old Spice. It's not dumped there because you are ashamed to wear it now but because that strap has broke and the battery ran down along time ago and you just didn't fancy getting it fixed. Like mobile phones and many other modern electrical devices the branded battery replacement often costs more than the device itself, certainly the case with digital watches and so just not worth replacing. My current cell phone demands I pay £29.99 for the requisite new battery from a specialist stockist?? This rip off is up there with printer ink cartridges, and that's saying something. You may as well have you clock on your phone these days.

The thing with digital watches is they had the power and room for all the extras, everything from stopwatches to multiple world time zones and even a compass if you so chose. You name it they tried to put it on it. I remember a guy at a running club I used to attend had a universal TV remote control on his and would flick through the channels from behind his pint, much to the bafflement and then annoyance of everyone else in the bar. It was quite funny but you can imagine it gets warring after a while with the family. It was a huge old thing like a Star Trek communicator. I bet he had one of those too at home.

I must admit I don't wear my Casio these days, not because it's un-cool or anything but because the battery is half dead. But it does have just enough power for the alarm to still work and so at the moment it's my morning wake up call as my clock radio is unfathomable as far as programming the alarm goes. It still has a great beep beep on it after all these years, all 20 seconds of it, and never fails to stir me, in many ways. If I did re-strap it and wear it there is not enough juice to spark the LED to full whack anyway and so you have to tilt it at a certain angle to the sun to read the time, somewhat ironically the same problem as my alarm clock. The backlight still works but the greatest fault with digital watches was if you pressed the wrong button it reset the whole watch and so over-sleeping inevitable. In fact by the late 1980s you were effectively wearing a clock radio on your arm they were that big, chunky and packed with gadgets.

You can still buy digital watches from Argos for a tenner upwards and the classic like this Casio also lurking on Ebay and Amazon. The manufacturers make them in pretty colors these days in the hope gay men and retro women buy them but the black with black plastic strap is still de regour. Never buy metal chunky straps for them as your arm hair will surely get caught in them for irritating pain all day long. But as much as an ideal timepiece these things are for your international bankers with its calculator and time zones they are extremely naff to wear today and will have to await their retro cool student status to return one day and so will remain in your top drawers until.