Collectibles

(~7 minutes to read)

How many things never cease to amaze you? The arrogance of politicians, the naivety of optimists, the gullibility of people who go to timeshare presentations, the stupidity of politicians, the number of cars on the road, the polarization of the climate change debate, the duplicity of politicians, the size of this week’s lottery prize, the amount of garbage discarded by one family/school/town/city in a week/month/year, the sleaziness of politicians… this could very easily become a long list, even without any more references to politicians.

Lots of things never cease to amaze me; the speed with which my bank balance decreases in any given month, for example. But the thing that’s on my mind right now is the diversity of items that people collect.

Among the people I know or have known, I have an engine collector, a glass bottle collector, a lighter collector, an ailment collector (hypochondriac by any other name), a barbed wire collector, and a ticket collector (but he works at the movie theatre so he doesn’t count; in fact he can’t count, but I digress).

One friend collects the little sugar sachets that one finds in hotels, restaurants, cafés and the like. Rather than “liberating” full ones, he pacifies his conscience by taking the ones that people have opened and used. Empty sugar sachets—I call them sweet nothings.

My late father-in-law collected garden gnomes. He acquired them in all sorts of conditions and restored them to their former glory. He displayed his favourite ones in his front yard, which he referred to as “Gnome Man’s Land.” He had no shame.

If I were to cast the net a little wider, doubtless I’d find people who collect “useless junk” such as wind-up gramophones, typewriters, 8-track cartridges, saphorisms (my portmanteau of “sappy” and “aphorism”) and Facebook Friends. In a parallel with Rule 34 of the Internet, if you can think of it, there’s probably someone out there who collects it.

Mrs. H’s penchant is frogs. She has plastic frogs, china frogs, brass frogs, glass frogs, jade frogs, stone frogs, wicker frogs, cuddly frogs and wire-and-tin frogs. She has frogs fishing, playing golf, reading newspapers, fighting with an umbrella, complaining about being pregnant(?!) and sunbathing.

And they all look so cute. Or at least, that’s the theory. But do they bear any resemblance to the real thing? Of course not. Real frogs are ugly, wet, squidgy things that are inclined to jump when you least expect them to, and if you’re not careful, might just deposit body fluids in your hand when you’re holding them.

Not for nothing was a frog chosen as the creature the princess has to kiss in order to find her true love—it would be too easy if she has to kiss a cute puppy!

Why do ornament manufacturers choose subjects that in nature are less than lovely, and pretty them up? Lengthen the legs, add big doey eyes and a disarming smile, and Robert’s your parent’s male sibling.

Walt Disney did it with Jimminy Cricket (among others). I bet Walt never lay awake in a house, watching and listening to the crickets under the bed and in the walls? Have you met one, eyes to eye?

Crimminy Jimminy, where did you get your looks from? Certainly not Mum or Dad!

Take stamp collecting (please take stamp collecting – I don’t want it!). With all due respect to philatelists everywhere, I cannot see how grown adults can get excited about little bits of sticky paper that in most cases have probably never seen the inside of a mail box.
Schoolboy stamp collecting for me in England in the 1960s consisted of buying a stamp album (two shillings and sixpence, 12.5 pence, 20 cents), a package of mounts (fourpence, 1.5p, 2 cents) and a package of assorted stamps (two shillings, 10p, 16 cents).

Based on statistical analysis of my collection (well, from memory actually; I wasn’t into statistical analysis as a pre-teen, and I sure as heck don’t have my stamp albums anymore), I’ve determined that the Greeks must send twelve times as many letters as the rest of the world combined. It seemed like every package of stamps I bought was full of stamps with “Hellas” on them, which is strange, because at the time, the stamps would have had “ΕΛΛΑΣ” on them. But irrespective of the inscription, my Greek stamps filled multiple pages, and I had to put Guatemala and Guyana on the same page.

My sister-in-law philatalised in a similar fashion. And like me, she was convinced that in one of those two-shilling packets, she’d one day find a penny black. And like me and thousands of other kids, she never did.

Car registration numbers (translation for North Americans – sort of like licence plate numbers). Now there’s a pointless collectible. But I did it. As a child I used to wander around the car parks and streets of my home town, writing down registration numbers, then I’d take them home and sort them into alpha-numeric sequence.

I don’t know why I did this. It didn’t even keep me off the streets.

Trainspotting. A hobby with definite nostalgia value. The aim (for the uninitiated) is to ‘spot’ as many different locomotives as you could and collect their names, numbers and date and place spotted and write them all in a grubby pocket book. Apparently a clean pocket book isn’t good enough – it has to be grubby.

My collection never really got off the ground. First time I went, I asked at the station ticket office for a platform ticket, and was asked ‘what for’. I said “to go train spotting”, and the ticket office man suggested that I “clear off!” (That’s not what he actually said, but good taste prevents me from reproducing his actual suggestion).

That experience put me off train spotting for life as well as traumatizing me more than somewhat. It was only recently that I discovered that there probably wouldn’t have been too many collectible, nostalgic steam locomotives passing through a London Underground station in 1967.

I know someone who collects penalty points on his driver’s licence. He likes to live close to the edge, so he aims to collect to within one point of disqualification, then stay ‘clean’ until some of them lapse. To each his own.

Pub memorabilia is something that a lot of people seem to collect. Glasses, jugs, drip towels, beer mats and more have all been known to go walkies. Some guys take the servers home. Even tables and chairs have been known to use their legs for more than merely standing.
It seems there’s only one thing that isn’t screwed down that people don’t take home from a pub – the beer they drink. That’s only rented…

Inebriation does seem to bring out the magpie instinct in some people – a friend once decided to dance with a temporary bus stop sign; he danced it all the way home. The relationship developed, and the bus stop moved in with him for several months. But he was by no means faithful to it, because during those months, successive drunken Saturday nights were marked by the seduction and elopement of two more bus stops, a “man fighting with umbrella” road works sign and a “Police Accident” sign.

The menage à six was abruptly dispersed one Sunday though. My friend had applied to join the police force in his area and one of the stages of application (apparently) is for a senior officer to pay an uninvited visit to the applicant’s home. Imagine the dialogue that followed my friend opening the door to a police inspector who gazed very quizzically at the road sign collection in the hallway.

Whether it’s concert programs, works of art, autographs, operation scars, fossils, bubble gum cards, grandfather clocks, cars, criminal convictions, pianos or butterflies, there will always be collections in existence, There probably isn’t a collection of space ships in existence yet, but I’m sure the day will come.

And if your collection ever loses its value or appeal, you can be sure that there’ll be at least one collector who will take it off your hands – the garbage collector!

Your Turn

Do you collect something out of the ordinary? Do you know someone who does? Tell the world about it by leaving a comment.