In particular, Breguet I had studied for 10 or more years. I learnt a tremendous amount about that, and of course I'd learnt a great deal about watchmaking, which was quite different to restoration, and what to do with that knowledge?

Well, it seemed to me the answer was to publish it in book form so that it wouldn't get lost. I realised that if I didn't write the Breguet book before I got deeply into making watches, then I would forget to do so and would forget what was in it and it would be lost. And as it contained absolutely unique knowledge of the watches and the mechanisms and... interesting information from Breguet's archives in Paris, to which I had total access, I knew that if I didn't get that down on paper, it would be lost. And so I set to... brought out all my photographs, which I had taken during all the years I worked on antique watches from about 1960, and I had bought myself a Leica camera, because a Leica camera was a beautiful, neat precision instrument, which appealed to me, quite unsuited for taking pictures of watches but I didn't mind that, I just wanted a Leica camera. And I did use it to take all the pictures in the book in the end, even holding it one and a half metres above my head to photograph something on the floor. Still I got the pictures I wanted with that camera. I only had the one lens, which meant it was very limited, but it did what I wanted, and I brought out all these photographs and there were hundreds of them.

And then I went through them, I began to realise that there was a definite progressive pattern on all Breguet's products. He made many, many different types of products, but each one had a progression towards ultimate development. And so it then became easy to get the book into perspective and to write about it and as I... as with the English makers, I'd been very, very close to my 'friends', and so I was with Breguet. I was a friend of Breguet because we'd been together all these years and I knew everything that he had done. I'd made drawings of all his mechanisms and explained how they worked, and so it was a very easy matter really for me to write that book. I just settled down to it and I think in three months it was all written, and with another couple of week's work, it was all ready for the printers. So it was published by 1975 and was very well received because it's the only complete book, not on Breguet, but on his art, his work, that's what it was meant to be. Since then, other books have come out, which are sort of coffee table books and they talk about the customers who bought Breguets. They're jolly nice... social history, but I'm a technical man and so it doesn't particularly interest me. I preferred the mechanical aspects.

And the book was very well received and sold, and it's gone through half a dozen reprints now and it's in French and Italian and that's all very satisfying. I never ever made any money out of it as far as I can remember, but then, you know, if you're not a professional novel writer, you don't expect to make money out of technical books.