Ewan McGregor wears a MWC

Renton and Spud sit in the grass at the top of Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh spread out below them under a low sun. Renton has just run his oldest friend up the hill, and he is trying to talk him off heroin and onto something else, anything, telling Spud to take the craving and point it at running instead. This is T2 Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's 2017 sequel, with Ewan McGregor back as Renton twenty years after he robbed these same friends of sixteen thousand pounds and left four thousand in a locker for Spud on his way out. The film is about time, mostly the kind you do not get back.

On Renton's wrist is an MWC, leather strap and stainless steel, which Propstore later sold as a screen-used prop with a certificate of authenticity and its original labelled production box. MWC stands for Military Watch Company, founded in 1974 and run out of Zurich, and it really does supply armed forces: its G10 general-service watch sits on the British Army's books under a NATO stock number. The watches are plain and cheap, a few hundred dollars, built to give a soldier the time in the field and little else. It is the most regulated object in the movie, made by a company whose whole business is keeping soldiers on schedule. Renton is wearing it while he tells an addict to find a discipline he has never managed himself.

Propstore did not sell the watch on its own. It came paired with Renton's wedding band, from the Amsterdam marriage that comes apart over the film, his Dutch wife filing for divorce while his job goes out from under him. The two things a settled life is supposed to leave a man, boxed together and sold with a certificate.