With the expense of Christmas and New Year’s Eve behind us, and the very real expense of the Lunar New Year looming, the last thing most of you want to be thinking about, probably, is buying a watch.

Watch sales are down. Crash. Bang. Wallop. It’s all gone terribly wrong. For the Swiss, that is. All the doom and gloom stories (most of which I’ve written in my role as chief doom-monger) about watch ...