Collection

Apart from starting and maintaining a prized collection of well, just about anything, the most exciting thing is deciding what that obsession will be in the first place. 

I have experienced that raw emotion when coming across something that could fulfil that deep rooted necessity, and it is a primeval urge more than anything, only to be disappointed by a false trail or unfulfilled promise. 

In my very earliest years I am told that I started a few fledgling collections that included toy cars, plastic figures of soldiers and an assortment of pebbles and stones. 

About the age of 7 I had a fascination with spent ammunition and would come back from a day out at a former shooting range with mangled lead bullets that could be found just beneath the surface of the sandy heathland that doubled up as a playground. I had no sense of the toxicity of lead although my family do sometimes allude to my erratic later years behaviour as being a consequence of exposure to that toxin.

I progressed in 1970 to collecting football cards. It was the year of a World Cup and for an old sixpence or expressed in the new decimal currency as 2.5 pence you could buy a packet of glossy paper pictures of the squad players of all of the competing teams. My pocket money just about stretched to a weekly purchase and I soon started to fill up the single or double pages whilst accumulating the inevitable swaps. These could be traded in the playground with classmates but there were always the exclusive cards and the elusive ones as well. I was determined not to give in to the temptation to just send off for the missing ones. 

I still have that 1970 album and the gaping gaps in some of its pages are a bit annoying whenever I take it out to show anyone although I do give myself some credit for sticking to my convictions. 

My interest in football and in particular the much anticipated attendances with my Father at Second Division home games of the mighty Scunthorpe United saw a modest collection of match programmes. Those from the early 1970’s were little more than pamphlets with a lot of poor graphics advertising the services of local businesses in stark contrast to the mini magazines that are produced today. The Old Show Ground where Scunny played had a small kiosk selling team memorabilia and from here I bought programmes from other teams. 

A school trip to Wembley in 1974 when Malcolm MacDonald scored all 5 goals in a defeat of Cyprus gave me my first exotic programme which was soon added to over the proceeding years. 

I was always looking out for a new collecting hobby. 

Car badges were very sought after with a few local motorists in our town reporting damage to their radiator grilles , bonnet and boot lids from youngsters prizing off chrome or plastic trophies. I did not resort to such criminality on the streets but did greatly embarrass my Father when, during his visit to the scrapyard for spare parts for the family Morris Minor to which I tagged along, I slipped into his coat pockets a few badges that I had stolen from the vehicles lying around. The staff had been watching me do this and were polite although abrupt in giving my Father the opportunity to pay for the contraband. 

I was grounded for a while after that. 

I took the punishment or rather used the time to plan my next collection. 

It started with the first publication of a new boys magazine called Speed and Power and lasted through to the very last edition of around 70. These are still, perhaps, amongst my prized possessions and make for interesting reading even now. 

Other targets for an obsession were less successful. 

These included spent fireworks which smelt awful after a while, the reflective lenses out of highway cats eyes, Marmite jars and also a brief flirtation with, of course stamps and coins. 

The collective body of my youthful collections has followed me around in my adult years in a large green metal trunk which, from a stuck on registration plate, was at one time the back box from an old motor vehicle. 

It is a strange sensation opening that lid as though my past life flashes in front of me but I would not hesitate to do the same thing again…. Well, I might think seriously aboutgetting a much bigger trunk that is.