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#251 – London Journal #17 – Last Night in London, Part A – The Passion of Howard Lederer
[My last night in London was Wednesday, September 19. I posted 14 items that day about the Million Dollar Cash Game (MDCG). The internet connection went out after post #13/M. I was cursing the loss of connection but even my misfortune had a lucky aspect: the outage occurred right AFTER I posted about the biggest moment of the game, the $807,400 pot won by Phil Ivey over Patrik Antonius. Many interesting things happened after that, and some were summarized in the post I made from Uncle Tilty’s suite at 2 AM and the rest will appear in this series of posts about my last night in London.]
I ask the driver the length of the trip to Gatwick Airport. He says, “About an hour and ten minutes.”
That will get me to the airport in just enough time for my flight to Phoenix (by way of Minneapolis). But it takes us 15 minutes to pass the London Bridge Underground Station, which is 200 meters from my hotel.
The car picked me up at 9:30 AM, after I enjoyed 2 ½ hours of sleep. It was 4 AM when I got back to my room and it took me 2 hours to corral 17 days of clothes, books, gifts, equipment, notes, work supplies, currency, phones, iPods, etc. into my four bags (which don’t include the two bags which are packed inside other bags). I’m impressed it took me ONLY 2 hours.
So how do I get from the MDCG, which ended play at 10:30 PM, to being lucky to get to sleep 7 ½ hours later? I’ll try working backwards.
It’s 3:30 AM. I’ve been in Uncle Tilty’s room for about 2 hours. This is a wonderful tradition of the last three nights, going to his room after dinner for drinks, cigars, and talk. (I think the tradition has gone on longer but I got myself included only over the last 3 nights.)
We got to his room after dinner, at about 1:30 AM – more on dinner later because we’re going backwards. The group included Uncle Tilty, Howard Lederer, Jeremiah Smith, Roland de Wolfe, and Patrik Antonius, several others, and me.
Howard, whose brother-in-law is a vintner and who is an oenophile and a hobbyist of several forms of spirits, has become a devotee of Madiera, the aged, fortified wine named for the place it comes from. Over the last three days, Uncle Tilty has spent some big bucks on dusty bottles of 40 to 100 year-old Madiera. Although I don’t drink, I enjoy just about anything that someone can be passionate about and Howard is a great hobbyist, regardless of the hobby. He told the story of Madiera, which is quite interesting.
A little later, he was talking about a wristwatch he just acquired, an incredible timepiece from IWC, called the Portuguese Perpetual. Mechanical watches – no batteries, all the mechanisms powered by springs and made by primarily by hand – are referred to as “complicated” in hobby/industry talk and the more detailed the mechanism, the more “complications” it has. This is one of the most complicated watches imaginable. Most mechanical watches need to be wound every 40 hours or so or they stop. (The spring that you wind with the stem and/or kinetic movement of your arm can only coil tight enough to “uncoil” in 40 hours time.) This watch has a power reserve – tiny, tiny springs – that can power the watch without winding for up to 168 hours, or 7 days.
It also has a perpetual calendar. Many mechanical watches have the date and several include the day of the week. It’s much more complicated to include the month of the year because not all months, of course, have the same number of days. In fact, if it’s not an “annual calendar,” you need to manually change the date at the end of the non-31-day months. The perpetual calendar not only gets each month’s number of days right – there are no microchips here, just extra microscopic man-made gears and springs – but every 4 years, it doesn’t change from February to March until after the 29th.
It also has a moon-phase, a tiny window that accurately shows the phase of the moon. Like the perpetual calendar, the moon phase is incredibly complicated because the phases of the moon are not the same as the months of the year. They require their own separate gears and springs.
In short, this kind of watch is a triumph of craftsmanship and tradition. Yes, for way under $100 you can get a watch to do all these things with a microchip and a battery, but there is a joy some people feel – I know I’m one of them – in owning and using a product that does all these things in a centuries-old fashion.
Not to say we weren’t busting Howard’s balls a little. He explained how one his great moments with this watch was being outside on a beautiful evening, looking up at the moon, and seeing the identical image on the face of his watch.
I said, “And your sister Annie would tell you, ‘That’s why you fucking wasted so much money. Why own a watch that shows you the moon-phase when you can just look out the window and see the same thing?’”
There is also a little window in the lower left portion of the face with the year. That changes each year but the first two digits, now at “20”, only go to “20”, “21”, and “22”. “The watch comes with a little disk,” Howard told us, “with the numbers ’22’, ‘23’, and ‘24’. It has instructions to take it to an IWC dealer between 2200 and 2300 to get the new wheel installed.”
We started guessing the number of generations before one of Howard Lederer’s descendants hocks the watch, and the likelihood it will still be in the family when some great-great-great-great-grand-somebody would have to take it back to the shop. Howard’s only hope is if he, like Don Vito Corleone tried and failed before him, can keep his son out of the family business.
Howard Lederer usually presents a picture to the world of someone difficult to know, difficult to reach. He doesn’t convey a lot of emotion. And though I’ve known him a long time, I can’t honestly say there have been a lot of moments when I’ve felt close to him. But he is a man of enormous passion. For Lederer, being involved in something means being involved ALL THE WAY.
I admire that kind of commitment and it’s the way I treat my own interests. In fact, we have had many of the SAME interests. In theory, that should make us closer. In practice, I feel like I can’t shut up and listen when he’s talking about these subjects because I want to chip in with my own opinion, implying that I know different or better. It’s great if people appreciate your passions. Not so great if someone tries hijacking the discussion with their own agenda.
That’d be me.
Jo Anne and I joke with the kids that none of them ever likes to leave an opinion unexpressed and they always have to get in the last word. They got that from SOMEWHERE.
So I apologize, Howard, if I mumbled something about Madiera tasting like tawny port. Or about Phil Ivey’s Audemars Piguet tourbillon (don’t even get me started on tourbillons). If, the next time we talk, I go on and on about Smythson Panama featherweight journals (£38 for the little ones, of which I bought 7 in London) or Montblanc Writers Series pens, you have permission either to ridicule or tell your own pen and journal stories.
