FIRST, FIND YOUR IDIOT

I'm often being informed that lots of the things that lie scattered about my little house are "worth" quite a lot. Various old magazines with pictures of particular movie or television stars on the cover will go for quite a few more quid than marked as the cover price apparently, if you know where to look and can be bothered to go looking for the keenest sort of buyer.

However, when you look into it, most of the contents of the various stacks of old magazines the are lying about the place and threatening to engulf me if they should ever collapse are already for sale on certain e-selling sites and often either fail to sell at all, or disappear at a price that is usually just a few pence.

Bloody so-called "Collector's Editions…" or "Exclusive Covers…" or things printed with several covers to tempt the gullible.

Occasionally one lucky seller will find that there is a bidding war for that old edition of something that they just happened to hang on to, but it does rather depend upon two keen and eager buyers happening to come across your offer to sell at precisely the same moment.

In other words, first, find your idiot… then hope that you'll find another idiot at about the same time.

After all, if someone is stupid or desperate enough to want that old Radio Times with "Harry Potter" on the cover that they'll pay three figures for it, who am I to stop them…? It can be quite easy for the unscrupulous dealer to manipulate the obsessions of others so that they are persuaded that some old pieces of tat are actually worth a week's salary to them.

Of course, in the real world, most things are only really "worth" what someone is prepared to pay for them…

You can walk around your house looking at stuff and thinking "Well, I paid XX for that so it must be worth at least YY" or you might be lucky enough to notice that somebody once paid hundreds for something that you also happen to have a copy of, but that doesn't mean that anyone's going to give you a similar price for one, and it might still end up going for seven pence on eBay, only to be sold on by your far more savvy purchaser for those mythical hundreds once they've got their grubby little mitts upon it…

Let the seller beware...

I may well have spent twenty quid or more on that shiny new book when I first bought it, but other copies still turn up in the remainder outlets for less than a quarter of that, or even in the charity shop for a couple of quid if only I'd been more patient, or selling on Amazon for £0.01 (plus postage) if I really want to feel fed up about it.

There, unfortunately, is the reality of it...

Once upon a time, I think that I genuinely believed that I might be creating an archive, or maybe I might need reference material for some topics I was becoming a minor league "expert" in and might be able to give talks about, if I was ever so inclined.

However, these days I'm very aware that it's far more likely that it will all end up just being thrown into a skip once I've carked it.

Still, it's much the same with anything. Houses, cars, jewellery, fine art. Things that are "precious" to you are only so much landfill to almost everyone else… unless they think that they can sniff out a bargain…

Because that's the other side of the coin, isn't it. You're out to get as much as you can for your tat, whereas everyone else is looking to get it as cheaply as they can and maybe make a tidy profit.

There's also the tiny problem that any collector has. How do you get rid of a collection what you've built up without grieving for its loss…?

There are now hundreds of editions of "Empire" Magazine stacked up in my house that I can't see anyone ever wanting, but if I sold them en masse they'd probably struggle to make me a tenner, but individual copies with certain actors on the cover might be able to be sold at many times that on their own to a "Star Trek" or "James Bond" fan, if you know where to look for one...

SHELLS

I do like collecting shells, albeit in a small way.

After all, there are seldom any rare Conch shells likely to turn up in the places I tend to end up heading on holiday and, to be frank, I'm hardly Ursula Andress, but the occasional nicely coloured cockle shell has been known to catch my eye and end up in the back of the car for a while before being placed on a shelf to gather dust, or inside a shoebox, or perhaps on my desk as a small reminder of happier days.

That is probably why his large pile of shells stacked up in a corner of a mud flat recently caught my eye. Not because I wanted to pick them up, but because I was suddenly reminded of quite how so many of them get left on the beaches so that I can pick up a few of them from time to time.

I realised that they were only there, of course, because of the large amount of wading birds that were using that particular mud flat, and that these shells represented a whole lot of lunch with each one having been picked clean by some bird or other as the tide receded.

Nature raw in tooth and claw and, of course, beak.

Each and every one represents a little tragedy for a marine bivalve mollusc and a little victory for a wading bird in nature's great game of life, and, given enough time, the empty shells will be ground down or stepped on to make more of the material of the beach itself, or picked up and carried away to end up on the sea floor or glued onto jewellery boxes and other touristy nick-nacks.

Sometimes just one colourful shell will attract my attention and I'll carry it around for a while, even though the colour which I first noticed will fade as it dries, only to be brought back to vibrancy by the magical addition of a little water. On other times, just the sheer volume of them will make me want to fill my viewfinder and take a snapshot which might - but probably won't - serve as a desktop pattern for a while.

Maybe I like shells because I spend so much time in a shell of my own making?

Or perhaps it's just because they're all rather pretty...?

Or maybe they just remind me of happier days...

It's so hard to tell any more.

THOSE 12 RT COVERS IN FULL

A cynical marketing ploy it may very well be, but for the week of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, that venerable old organ of programme listings publications, the Radio Times, printed twelve distinct and separate covers to "celebrate" the TV show in question on the presumption that sad little completists like myself would dash out and buy all twelve so that we could leave them rotting in boxes in our attics and basements until they become "worth something" even though, given that the RT remains Britain's biggest-selling weekly magazine, there are likely to be one or two about to keep the value low.

Or maybe they'll be gathering them up to sell to gullible foreign fans whose access to such merely national treasures is more limited than our own, and seeing them as a bit of an investment opportunity.

But I kid you not. A quick glance on eBay shows that a recent edition bearing a "Poirot" cover is for sale for thirty quid a mere two weeks after it came out, although just because it's on sale at that price doesn't mean that anyone will actually pay it.

That said, the editions from the 1960s, those old black and white "newsprint" editions featuring Daleks or William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton can actually fetch hundreds of pounds, so who knows what this week's bunch will go for if you've got another fifty years or so to wait...

That's the thing about collectors of ephemera, though. They know full well that most ordinary sane readers chuck the thing into the recycling at the end of the relevant week, and the "rarity" value immediately increases accordingly. Tales of people coming home from school and finding that there mum had thrown out all of their old "Eagle" comics find grown(ish) men weeping in corners, whilst the reality of the situation is that copies of editions lying in those stacks of old "Empire" magazines which still take up far, far too much space in our tiny little house, are still selling for £0.00 each (with no bidders) and are effectively worthless, as the Beloved keeps reminding me...

Ah but, you see...

A couple of months after my mum moved out of her house and into the flat which she spent the last decade of her life living in, I went to a Film Fair and noticed a stall completely full of old Radio Times editions selling at around six quid a copy and seethed quietly at the realisation that I'd just thrown several years worth into big bags and taken them to the tip as I'd been clearing my "old rubbish" out of mum's garage.

Mind you, whether I could have been bothered trying to actually find a buyer for them is a completely different thing and is, presumably, what marks out the person who seizes an opportunity from the rest of us. The truth is that I probably wouldn't have done anything about it even if I'd known about it, because it would have seemed like far, far too much trouble and, of course, the pragmatist has to understand that there's no point in fretting about something that you've already let go.

Meanwhile, and before you ask, no.

I did not go out and buy myself all twelve of these... Although I may have got myself more than one before I recognised that that was indeed the way madness lies.

Other past "Radio Times" covers can currently be seen at:
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-11-18/partners-in-time-50-years-of-doctor-who-radio-times-covers
and all artwork is of course (c) covered by their copyright - although I'll be claiming that they're in the public domain if anyone asks...

READING TIME

Time, I think, to cease all my prattling and go away and do some reading instead. The piles of books about the place in need of reading are starting to get both ridiculous in quantity and neglected and dust covered by the lack of attention being paid to them.

Somehow, I feel, all of this acquiring of more books just really has to stop. I occasionally try to convince myself that I’m not allowed to get another one until I’ve finished one, a kind of “one-for-one deal” if you like, but then I discover that I’m weak and feeble and I put down my coin and pick up yet another volume that I’m really interested in reading, add it to the pile and ignore it, safe in the knowledge that because I now have it, I can read it any time I like, so I don’t actually have to read it now.

Even the essentially trashy options offered by the average supermarket can still suck me in when I spot something that looks a bit “interesting” or that the latest release of a thriller series is just out in paperback and is available at the ridiculously low prices they offer.

But then, even reading an article or venturing into an online “chat room” isn’t safe, as references will be made to books that I haven’t previously heard of and I will go looking for them, add them to my personal “wish list” and then constantly check the price to see if it has dropped enough for me to justify the acquisition of it.

Then I order it anyway.

Fear and loathing of the possibilities of the dreaded “This title is no longer available” or simply, as it used to be called, being “out of print”, can fill me with such a twitching potential horror of having missed the boat and years of trudging pointlessly around book fairs and second-hand shops on the “off-chance” I might spot a copy, that my resistance will simply crumble away to dust.

Well it’s either that or paying over the odds at specialist retailers or the more insidious nastiness of ebay and its fretful bidding wars. Usually, in the past, if I did succumb to such folly, I would spot the very volume I had sought in a charity shop for under a quid within days of paying over the odds, such is the ironic life of the avid collector of specific titles.

Of course, the other way around it is never true. You will never just happen upon the volume you seek before the whole rigmarole of being fleeced has occurred. Oh no! That kind of luck or my discovery of a genuine bargain is about as likely as me deciding that I might like to watch an Olympic event (which I don’t, by the way...), only to discover that someone has randomly posted me the very tickets I needed.

Even the momentary weakness of cracking and putting in an online order is fraught with danger and traps for the unwary. “Helpful” labels along the lines of “People who bought that also bought this” can open up a vast range of previously unheard-of volumes of a similar hue which can get so very easily clicked on and added to either the shopping basket (if I’m feeling outrageously weak) or the “wish list” (if I’m having a moment of being made of sterner stuff).

The difficulty, of course, is actually finding the time to do any actual reading. Now that I seem to have committed myself, for good or ill, to writing these regular outpourings of nonsense, those few moments in which I cracked open the smooth pages of a virgin paperback are reduced for me. This particular bit of nonsense which you are now reading was mostly knocked out (apart from the later judicious editing) in a half hour period at a time on a Monday morning before even the milkman had got up, which used to be the insomniac’s witching hour when I would either get up and read or catch up on the backlog of telly.

Happily, at least, the distractions of telly are far fewer these days and I seem to have actually watched just about everything that was ever worth watching via the medium of the “shiny disc” and nothing new that is being produced looks as if it will entice me back in quite the same way.

Equally, those other moments when I used to wait for the clock to tick around to the “official” start of the working day in which I used to devour both literature and fact-based reading is now spent sitting in traffic and swearing at it under my breath in a creative deluge that might have once made even the most radical of authors blush.

So maybe it really is time to pack away my writing head and blow the dust off my reading head instead...

Now, where should I start...?

“DINKY” DAYS 2: SEVEN YEARS LATER

I wasn’t going to bother you with this, but since my previous little tale about my old “Dinky Toys” catalogue went down so well (slight pause to savour a moment steeped in heavy sarcasm), I thought I could “entertain” you still further by telling you all about its faithful companion, which sat alongside it waiting to be rediscovered on that same dusty shelf a couple of weeks ago.

This version dates from about seven years later and is copyright marked 1977, and is in much better condition as it dates from a time when I would have been around thirteen years old and well into my “preservation of precious things” phase.

The world has changed. The price for such a catalogue is now 5p, which in the currency at the time of the old catalogue would have been one shilling, or 12d and represents a 400% price increase over those few short years. It seems odd now, living in a time when 5p has become so much fiddling small change to think about what a mighty figure the shilling once was when £5 a year could once employ the services of a housemaid.

Interesting too that the decimalisation of our currency wasn’t supposed to make things more expensive, but inevitably did, which is something to bear in mind when the Euro is ultimately brought in (should it survive...). Looking back upon those intervening years I can clearly remember the days when people still felt the need to “convert” the price of things into “old money” just to see how expensive they really were, and five divided by twelve was always going to mean that things got rounded up, even with the long lost “half pence piece” doing its best to even things out. Strangely enough, I don’t really remember when people generally stopped doing that (although I occasionally still do…). Equally, even if I try really hard, I have no memory at all of ever handing over one of those huge, brown discs that were the “old pennies” in a shop, although I must have done so many times as a tiny new potato.

Anyway, it’s seven years later and decimalisation is far behind us, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the coming of Punk Rock are upon us and in this brave, confident new world, “Dinky Toys” remain a cornerstone of many a young chap’s toybox. There seems to be “trouble at mill” though. The exciting new designs being promoted to the eagerly waiting world on the cover are from an American TV show that had ended about the time of that previous catalogue. On the pages within, the hugely popular “Space: 1999” Eagle transporters have had a restyled paint job with the engine cowlings now being presented in a nasty red plastic effect and the freighter becoming “metallic” blue. Dinky have been very loyal to the Gerry Anderson shows, with the “Interceptor” and “SHADO Mobile” tie in toys from his long defunct 1960s show “UFO” still seeming to be popular, although the sole survivor from the previous range of toys in that earlier catalogue, the much-loved “Thunderbird 2”, has now also been resprayed blue.

Heresy!

Otherwise the toys of 1977 remain very similar to those of the late 1960s, even though the way chosen to display them has altered, with slightly blurry photographs just being labeled with enigmatic numbers, and line drawing of the side profile of each vehicle helpfully telling you how big they are, or other “special features” like that. There is even a model (a person model, not a car model… A model amongst the models… Hmmm…) being used to make the pages more “exciting”, although he is a small child wearing a variety of helmets (astronaut, racing driver, policeman, soldier, construction worker… I wonder if he ended up singing with the “Village People”…?), presumably to help remind the potential customer quite what their target demographic actually was.

The cars themselves are a strange late 1970s bunch. John Steed’s “Special” Leyland Jaguar appears to have a spring-loaded door to knock down villains (and diabolical masterminds, obviously), but on the opposite page to one displaying such sportscar greats as a Lamborghini Marzal, a Corvette Stingray, a Porsche and (er…) a Triumph TR7, there are three cars of a less exciting hue, two of which are actually brown; A Mini, a Volvo estate and an Austin Princess, which does actually win my own personal award for the worst single car in the history of car making ever. I bet the kids were blown away by the exciting possibilities that trio offered up.

Much of the rest of the catalogue displays toys of a commercial or military nature which probably shows the way that the sales of toy cars were starting to move in, towards the “serious collector”. Aircraft, tanks and ships sit alongside the diggers, wagons  and police vehicles, although one final surprise does get pulled out of the hat in that year celebrating all things “regal” when Cinderella’s Coach from “The Slipper and the Rose” makes an appearance, although the young model himself doesn’t make an appearance and get to wear a tricorn hat (nor, to be fair, a tiara if we are considering all the potential headwear available to the designers) on that particular page.

The final few pages speak volumes about the various mergers and acquisitions that have taken place in the toy industry during the years between those two publications. Seven pages are devoted to promoting Meccano products, which have also moved with the times, as well as “Mogul” Steel Toys, whatever they were. They look big, chunky and American, as if Dinky were trying another merger to try to muscle in on the then popular “Tonka” market.

As for Meccano, well, the “new” Plastic Meccano has arrived, and the photo for their new “Prima” construction toy even has a girl in it. There was now “Pocket Meccano” (try getting that on a plane nowadays…), a crane building set and even “Multikits” to build Army vehicles (Oddly, I now remember I used to have one of these), Combat vehicles (did toymakers just assume that all boys were interested was “war”?), or Highway construction vehicles (as you were, apparently not…), and the main Meccano range itself now sees to come in sound and sturdy proper wooden cases.

None of these innovative new products would ultimately save Meccano, of course, as it was doomed to failure within a few short years, but it’s nice to see they were still trying.

A WHOLE OTHER WORLD

Here’s an insight into a world that really does no longer exist. Two boys sit happily in their belted shorts and long woollen socks cheerily playing with the results of their latest massive Meccano build. It’s rather hard to tell, but I suspect that they might even be wearing ties.

I found this, my old Meccano construction set instruction manual, sitting on a dusty bookshelf alongside an old work photograph a couple of weeks ago, when I was trying to find something else entirely, but, as ever with those of us who are easily bored, I found myself utterly distracted by it for a while, and it is a fascinating thing to look through. I can’t be one hundred percent sure of its actual vintage, because it comes from a time before everything had to be copyright stamped to prevent dishonest knock-offs, but the prices quoted are all in shillings and pence (with a “d”) and one of the “Meccano Guild” addresses is in Rhodesia.

The booklet itself is all that remains of my long lost Meccano set, which was despatched to another place many, many years ago. To be honest I didn’t really use it very much. We had a very similar relationship to the one I tended to have with my Lego set, in that, despite the possibilities of being “a new toy every day”, once I’d built something that I liked, I tended to keep it that way for some considerable time. The other problem is that I found Meccano, with its tiny screwdrivers and spanners impossibly fiddly to complete without ripping open the skin on my fingers because of the metal edges, which tended to take the joy out of it. I have similar problems now if I’m trying to get at one of the more awkward corners of the engine compartment in my car – scraped knuckles and more pain than gain.

My own set was actually very second-hand, which makes working out when this book dates from even more tricky. A lot of my toys, like a lot of my clothes, tended to be second-hand and from rather obscure sources. My father acquired them through his work, which either meant that they were being diverted from donations being made as they were considered “unsuitable” for the environments they had been donated to, or they had already been rejected, or played to death with, and were destined for the bins when I got them. There is the slightly more sinister idea (that has just rather alarmingly struck me…) that these were things given away after people had “lost” their own children and wanted to be rid of the stuff, but it’s probably not wise to venture there.

The instructions in this book speak hugely of all kinds of lost and forgotten worlds to our high-tech, compact-electronic modern eyes. The youngsters excitedly receiving this set brand new in the late 1950s or early 1960s were encouraged to build such “every day” objects as a “swing boat”, a “drop hammer”, some “counter scales”, a “punching machine” or a “lawn mower”, and that’s just on the front page.

Imagine the excitement of building your own “lawn mower”, modern youth of Britain, especially one that only looks “a bit like” a real lawnmower…

All of them were to be built in that chunky, punched metal approximation of the form of the larger “real-world” object they mimicked. That list of possible projects speaks volumes about the changes seen in this country over the last half century, when children would be familiar with a “steam wagon” or a “stamping mill” without further explanation. Some of the builds even attempt to replicate people with the nearest approximations of limbs and heads using the appropriate metal parts to make slightly scary robot-like equivalents of a “gymnast” or a “coster and barrow”. These required a lot of imagination to be considered human, but, I suppose, that’s precisely what they relied upon.

I don’t think I got as far as some of the more complex builds towards the back of the manual. These required bigger league sets than my second-hand version, which might have required further investment and for none of the pieces to have gone astray or been broken or bent beyond the possibility of reasonable repair. I do remember making the “counter scales” on one wet afternoon, and I have a vague recollection of another long afternoon spent putting the “drilling machine” together, but I think that project number 2.28, the “travelling breakdown crane” would have been way beyond my limits, and quite probably still would be.

The whole world of Meccano seems to be strangely exclusively masculine in its philosophy, as if the kind of boys who wished to build things out of Meccano wouldn’t want there to be even the slightest risk of having anything to do with girls, and as if girls wouldn’t even be remotely interested in leaving their prams and toy saucepans and go off and want to build something. An advert on page three (oo-er) screams “Boys! Read the Meccano Magazine” and then goes on to say that “The happiest and most successful boys are those who take a keen interest in the world around them”, presumably by locking themselves away in a dark and lonely room with an instruction manual and a tool kit. On the same page, an advert for joining “The Meccano Guild” describes it as “an organisation for boys, started at the request of boys, and as far as possible conducted by boys.”

The Meccano Guild was most probably not a proto-fascist organisation, but its “three great objects” were

1)    To make every boy’s life brighter and happier

2)    To foster clean-mindedness, truthfulness, ambition and initiative in boys

3)     To encourage boys in their hobbies, and especially in the development of their knowledge of mechanical and engineering principles

Try getting away with that sort of “no girls allowed” nonsense nowadays my lad and see what happens. Still, as a set of principles, they’re not the worst I’ve ever seen.

Perhaps the world was simpler then, but in many ways it was more complicated too. Playtime really did have a slightly educational aspect, and you had to “work” to get your “fun”, but I suppose there was the sense of having achieved something when you finally got it built, and I suspect that, hidden amongst all the pretence of playing, there was a slight notion of the majority of children being prepared for the big and scary grown-up world of quite similar “real” work just a few short years down the line. I imagine if you spent your entire childhood putting little bits of engineering together, then spending a lot of your adult life putting things together on an assembly line wasn’t quite such a stretch, but then the idea of Britain being a manufacturing base also comes from another world lost to us now.

Ultimately, when we look back with our rose-tinted glasses on the toys of yesteryear, we might dismiss the modern toys as being too easy, with all the imagination work done for you before you open the packaging, but the majority of the children of today (both boys and girls) will probably spend their working lives pushing buttons to run software designed by other people, so it’s exactly the same thing really.

“DINKY” DAYS

One of the things I found when trawling through the shelves on my recent quest to find something completely different in the darker corners of my little house was this rather ancient  “Dinky Toys” Catalogue which, despite the ephemeral nature of such things, seems to have, against all the odds, survived a good forty years of being packed up and travelling on to the next place I chose to call “home” with me.

As is usual with such objects from the dawn of your own life, it probably tells me more about my young self than it does about the toy cars it was trying to sell at the time. There is, of course, the fascinating sense of a forgotten world that seemed fresh and new at the time, but which has now slipped from our grasp and is lost forever, just out of the reach of our outstretched fingers. Dinky Toys itself is long gone, as is the system of currency that caused the catalogue to have a price of 3d, and even the store whose name is stamped on the back, Lewis’s Ltd, is now just a fading memory, although the building it for so long occupied at the edge of Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester still stands. As for the toy cars that were being advertised within, well they might have seemed cutting edge and fresh, exciting and new to the young boys of the late 1960s as they sat on the brink of the exciting possibilities that the 1970s promised, but now they are mostly the kind of thing you only see in old photographs, classic car shows, reruns of “The Sweeney” and rusting away in scrapyards. Time is the fire in which we all burn.

Skipping through the pages, I discover quite a lot about the six or seven year old me. For one thing I was not yet averse to marking such precious documents with my felt-tipped pens, something I would frown upon doing nowadays. In a box printed on the back of the catalogue, the shop’s own stamp sits in fading purple ink, boxed off by my own wobbly linework, to separate it from my own address which has been added in one childish hand and then later over-written with later, more fluid strokes. This shows that this catalogue was a much-prized possession even then, speaking as it does of hopes of future toys and gifts, and being put safely aside for future reference. I suspect that, given our limited income in those days, not that such a concept would have been much understood by me at that age, those pictures in that catalogue was as close as I ever got to owning many of the actual toys themselves.

I’ve also tried unsuccessfully to colour in the band of colour containing the “Dinky” logo at the top of the page, and scrawled a massively inaccurate (and hopelessly primitive) “Joe 90” logo there too, which at least reveals one childhood obsession. I’ve even tried to draw the strange ball that Joe used to sit within, and, opening up the first page I discover that “Joe’s Car” is one of the vehicles that I have meticulously drawn a line around to indicate my interest. “Sam’s Car” has been dismissed by having a lightly drawn “X” scrawled over it, as has that cornerstone of many a late 1960s toybox, the classic “Thunderbird 2”, which is ironic, as that toy is one that I actually do remember once having.

The vehicles from Gerry Anderson’s popular puppet dramas dominate that opening page spread, and it seems that my desires alongside “Joe’s Car” included the entire range of Captain Scarlet’s “Terrific Trio” as well as Lady Penelope’s Rolls Royce “Fab 1”, although that too seems to have been crossed out by a later, more realistic hand. I never actually got to have any of them, though. As well as all these examples of my childish covetousness, my biro seems to have marked the word “Penelope” in an early attempt to remind myself of the pronunciation, which tells you a lot about how we were taught to read in those days, I’m sure. Oddly, given my later love of the show, the Mini Moke from “The Prisoner” sits unregarded at the bottom of page one.

It probably didn’t have any missiles.

Throughout the rest of those 24 pages of dreams and desirables, it is the cars that I have chosen to mark out that surprise me now. What kind of mind would pick out the surprisingly box-like Mk1 Vauxhall Viva , but be unmoved by the Jaguar “E” Type sitting next to it? Why would I covet the open top Aston Martin DB5, but be unstirred by the DB6? Why was the Rolls Royce Phantom V Limousine first circled and later crossed through? Did I have a sudden dislike of the kind of divisive lines in society that such a car represented…? Or was it just that I wanted the others more, had someone found the catalogue lying around at some time close to my birthday, perhaps?

There is a slightly perverse logic at play here. I seemed to like the Triumph Spitfire, the Volvo 1800S and the “Tow-Away Glider Set”, but the only toy car on those pages I ever actually had was the unmarked “Rolls Royce Silver Cloud Mark III”. Irony, it seems, crept into my existence at an early age. Why though would I want to pay special attention to a Saab 96, and yet also be simultaneously drawn towards both the Lamborghini Marzal and the boxy American monster that was the Pontiac Parisienne, but ignore the Ford Mustang Fastback and the Alfa Romeo Scarabeo OSI? On another page I seem to be impossibly impressed by such drabbery as the Ford Escort (Mk 1 – I actually ended up driving a real one of those), the Morris Mini Traveller and the Ford Zodiac Mark IV, but unimpressed by the Dino Ferrari and the Jensen FF.

Delving deeper, my desires seem to include all manner of military, police and fire service vehicles, but I remain unmoved by those twin stalwarts of the boy’s toybox, the double decker bus and the racing car. Nor did the tractors and other farming toys inspire me, but some of the odder choices did. Would I even have known what a “Brinks Armoured Car” did in those days? Still, it seems to have impressed me enough to make the cut, but then, so too did the Ford Transit van, so what did I know?

I seems to remember that I ended up actually owning very few of those toy cars, despite, I’m sure a constant barrage of suggestions and less than subtle attempts at persuasion. Perhaps this taught me that I couldn’t just have everything I wanted, or perhaps that little booklet just gives me a glimpse into the aspirations and desires of the me that once was.

Oddly enough, now that we are in “the future”, very few of the cars I see resemble “Joe’s Car”, and a great many of the vehicles I have ever owned tend more towards the duller end of the spectrum, so maybe all about me that was ever to be known was already written in the pages of a tatty little catalogue that has stayed with me for all those intervening decades.

THE BEST DARNED THING YOU’VE NEVER READ

The 'finished reading' stacks (part 1)

This is a house of books. They’re everywhere you look, some neatly placed on bookshelves, others piled up in various parts of the place, either waiting to be read or having been read and waiting to find a more suitable home. Perhaps, if the house started to fall down, the books might make a suitable alternative shelter, although the rain would probably ruin them, of course, so I’d never allow that. Maybe it’s the books that are holding the place up? I will take a book down off a shelf later on, if I’m feeling brave enough, and if I’m still here tomorrow, then you’ll know.

I sometimes see the houses of ‘ordinary people’ being interviewed on television and there isn’t a book in sight and it confuses me. Some might ask me how I live with all these books, but I will counter that I don’t understand how anyone can live without them. Other times, I watch shows about how to sell your house and am told that one of the things likely to turn off any potential buyer is having a load of books on display. They scream ‘clutter’, apparently, unless of course they just say that you’re trying to tell the whole world how ‘clever’ you think you are, which is, apparently, just another way to alienate everybody. How me owning books ever became transformed into my attempt to put people down and somehow ‘diminish’ them is a complete mystery to me. Maybe I should look up the reasons, but I haven’t got a book about that. Never-the-less, this modern world can sometimes seem to be turning into a very strange place.

I can see some of them now, all around me, stacked up on pretty much every surface. All those books that I’ve been told I should really read by someone who already has, so I went out and got a copy, and all those other ones I really just fancied reading, bought, and then haven’t quite got around to yet…

Just from here I can see a copy of a book of three Martin Crimp plays I was lent several years ago and which I definitely know I’ve read two of the plays out of. Beneath it is Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my Father” which I’ve definitely already heard on the audiobook CD someone lent us once, which is why I decided to go out and buy my own copy. Underneath that in the pile are two books t’beloved told me that I really should read, “The Lucifer Effect” and “Scenes from a Revolution”, and holding them up is a book I really fancied and ordered off the internet which is about the British Empire and called “Outposts” and beneath that at the bottom of that pile is the Dylan Thomas Omnibus that I blagged off my mother when she’d finished with it after they talked about it in her literature group a few years ago.

And that’s just one pile, a pile in fact that I keep meaning to return to (it stood at the bedside for quite some time before being relocated) if it wasn’t for the fact that every time I think about it, there’s another newer, fresher book that comes along to catch my eye and tempt me. I know for a fact that downstairs “The Book of the Moon” which I bought last week is my latest current reading and I’m just halfway through the first section, whilst Alan Coren’s “69 for 1” is literally on the brink of moving into the ‘finished reading’ stacks, before I make another attempt to carry on (for my third time of trying) with reading the latest volume of Clive James’ “Unreliable Memoirs” which is proving a beast to clamber through the first chapter of. But then, the latest paperback volume of “The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency” series has already been consumed by the beloved and now sits there in the living room just daring me to pick it up, so I’ll probably read that first, and I know the latest Mark Billingham is out in paperback any day now…

Then there are the gift books that are sitting in the Christmas present pile, which has merged with the latest birthday present pile and the selection from the previous Christmas. Lovely, beautiful volumes bought with thought and care and a knowledge of my passion for things historical, scientific or entertainment based and yet which remain unread, and of course there are a certain number of other volumes I’ve acquired for myself over the last couple of years just because my finger was hovering over that oh-so-tempting “One Click Ordering” button that catches my eye during the occasional lonely lunch break which are craving my attention.

What about all the books that I’ve been told about and not yet acquired…? Or all those guide books we bought on holiday…? And the further ones we got when we got back because we’d become interested in all the things we’d been exposed to whilst there…?

And there is a whole stack of reference books I’ve asked for and been given or acquired by other means whenever my latest obsession overtook me. A few years ago I was working on a play about the First World War and bought a stack of books about that, which led to a parallel interest in the Second World War and how it seemed to be an inevitable consequence of the first and so more reading needed to be done. Meanwhile, the anniversary of the moon landings came and went in 2009 and I got hugely interested in all things NASA related which led to a fascination with the planets in general which became a thirst for knowledge of geology and then the whole history of the Earth which transformed into both an interest in the weather and in paleontology and all of these topics have a wide range of reference materials some of which I have acquired just to get a bit of background knowledge and few of which I actually ever seem to get around to actually sitting down and damn well reading!!!

I really should just buy a book, read it, then go and buy another one, but, oh no, now they’re piling up to the point where, if I’m really lucky and manage to keep the heart pumping for another thirty years, there probably wouldn’t be enough time to read the books I’ve already got, not to mention the ones that I’m likely to want to get during that thirty years, especially as there’s still a fair few of those season box sets on shiny disc still wrapped in cellophane and waiting for us to find the 22 or so hours it’ll take to consume each of them, and I haven’t even mentioned the chunky thrillers I bought cheap in the remainder bookstore a couple of years ago…

When I was younger, it didn’t matter. I always felt there’d be plenty of time, I could put a book on the pile knowing that I would probably get around to it one day. “Yours to own forever on video” meant I’d be able to watch my favourite films as many times as I jolly well liked. Now most of them get viewed once because I’ve got a sense of having no time to waste (and there’s always something else to watch anyway), especially as I now want to fit in all the writing of my own words instead of sitting down and reading everyone else’s. But then, when I can never seem to find any actual time to do any reading any more, how can I expect anyone else to either? This does rather negate the point of actually producing them, but I persevere. I think it was John Humphrys who once said that one of the things he’d learnt as he got older was the wisdom to be able to leave a book unfinished if it really wasn’t interesting him enough, and I suppose the rule is true for all other forms of the written word.

There’s a whole megagoogolplex (or something) of words pouring out of us all every day, in newspapers, books, magazines and even little places like this, and nobody has the time to actually sit down and read the blooming things. Maybe if our silicon culture manages not to corrode and corrupt, just a few of all those words will remain for future, wiser generations to pore over and decipher and wonder at what we were all wittering on about. I even read some of my own witterings back to myself the other evening and didn’t find it all to be complete nonsense. Even if I do say it myself, there’s some pretty reasonable stuff in here, some of it that’s barely been glanced at if you look at the numbers, but then that should come as no real shock to me any more. Even so, I quite surprised myself, to be honest, when I discovered that I've been known to talk some sense occasionally. They don’t know what they’re missing out on (he muttered with a kind of ironic half-smile...). This might very well not be the best darned thing they’ve never read, but I’m doing the best I can…

RADIO TIMES DAY

To a creature of habit such as myself, daily, weekly and monthly routines become part of the very fabric of your being, and so it is that Tuesday is the day I like to get my new copy of the “Radio Times”. Not for me the trashy splurgy layouts of the other, ‘inferior’ TV Guides (although, of course, other TV guides are available…), oh no. This house is a “Radio Times” house and hopefully always will be. Weekly magazine sales might well be plummeting, but the Radio Times still claims a circulation record that in 1955 it sold over 8 million copies a week in a time when there were only just 2 television channels and most people still listened to their radiograms. Nowadays it still shifts about 1.5 million copies a week, but times are hard in the publishing world with all that lovely free online information persuading folk that they really don’t have to fork out £1.20 a week when they can get it “for nothing” (discuss…) online.

On my way to the station every Tuesday morning, except during December when publication dates go all to pieces, I will pull across into the lay-by outside the much beleaguered newsagents and pop inside, passing the surly youngsters that pass for delivery persons nowadays and hand my coins over to the retailer as he fights the good fight against the supermarkets which have bludgeoned their way onto his ‘turf’, and flit back to my car with the latest issue tucked under my jacket to keep the rain off. Then, after my railway duties are completed, I scurry home for a cup of coffee and a quick browse before the Tuesday toils begin. Variations on this routine have accompanied my various jobs and geographical locations across the years, but the result is always very similar. Next week’s TV and radio programmes, laid out in relatively easy-to-understand terms (although recent layout changes have proven to be a ‘talking point’ in our household and triggered the odd exasperated ‘tut’), ready for me to peruse over and pick and choose from.

For as long as I can remember the Radio Times has been a cornerstone of my week, even though we didn’t used to actually have it at home until I was old enough to get my own copy. I think my own love affair with this rather excellent publication started with the announcement of an ‘Tenth anniversary special’ being available at the end of an episode of Dr. Who when Mr Jon Pertwee was still in charge. I suspect that I whisked around to Mr Pennington’s as fast as my tiny legs could carry me, only to be bitterly disappointed when, being unaware at that young age as to how publishing actually worked, I found that they hadn’t come into the shop yet. A couple of years later there was a lovely painting by Frank Bellamy illustrating Tom Baker in mortal combat with the Loch Ness monster and so began the many years of hacking up my old issues to paste the important bits into my various scrapbooks.

When I had my paper round, I would dawdle more with my Wednesday deliveries (Wednesday? Wednesday! But I thought you said Tuesday was Radio Times day…) as I took a sneak peek at the latest issue just to see whether there was enough material that week to justify me getting my own copy. I was a good kid, you see. Never once did I even consider just swiping one and putting the blame on some inefficiency on the part of Mr Sellars who ran the Post Office. Wait a minute, wait a minute… (as I’m sure you’re not actually asking), who’s this Sellars bloke? What happened to Mr Pennington? Ah well, Pennington’s was the newsagency (or sweetshop if you prefer) that was halfway to school, but Mr Sellars ran the Post Office and newsagents that was in the other direction, but for whom I worked on my newspaper delivery duties during the long, dark morning hours in my brown ‘snorkel’ coat.

Being a good kid, I also went to Sunday School, and the church I reluctantly attended used to collect old newspapers to help keep its roof from leaking. Obviously they didn’t just stuff the roof with old newspapers, there was some kind of financial jiggery-pokery that meant that they got financial remuneration for every ton or so of papers they collected and the cash was used to maintain the roof (presumably by nailing the coins in place to keep the rain out – no wonder villains used to steal church roofs…). This meant that by the back door of the old Sunday School building (which is now rather strangely where my mum’s flat is…) people would leave boxes of their old newspapers and I would be able to sneak a look and grab any copies that I knew had photographs and articles in, whip out the relevant pages and stuff the rest back into the box without anyone noticing. I like to think that whatever God I thought might have been looking down on me back then didn’t resent the loss of those few pages and the pennies that he or she didn’t get for his or her holy roof-work because of the general happiness they added to my little life. Truth be told, you know that I almost certainly have the scrapbooks in a box somewhere hereabouts if he or she really wants them back.

Of course, in later years, via a rather lavishly illustrated book I found in the school library called “The Art of the Radio Times”, a book, incidentally that I never actually bought for myself (if you happen to have a spare copy lying around somewhere… Hint! Hint!), that the world of illustration and the Radio Times had a long and very noble history in each other’s company which sadly seemed to falter during the 1980s when full colour glossy printing and photography rather took over, and illustrators across the land had to seek other outlets for their dubious genius, although the bumper two-week Christmas edition (and what an exciting prospect that used to be!) still has a tendency towards the artwork option even now.

The Radio Times is an ephemeral thing, really, which is what they are supposed to be. Something you use for a week and then, like a cruel lover might, cast into the dustbin of history when you are all done with it. The problem is that I do find it very difficult to throw the bloomin’ things away, because there’s always something in them that I might just want to read again later, and so they start to pile up in various parts of the house, like having various accusatory elephants sitting in the room demanding that something be done about them. I could and would blame it on the film fair I went to a few years ago when I saw someone selling back copies for six quid a throw and the table was full of issues I remember having, but unfortunately it predates that. I remember throwing out a huge stack from my mother’s garage just before she moved house a decade or more ago, and there was a definite pang when I had to do it, which became a positive pain when I saw some of the issues on that traders stall and realised how many potential pounds I had just thrown away, although, if truth be told, I’d never have organised myself enough to have actually done anything about it.

However, I do know that somewhere hidden in the darkest corners of this abode of ours lurk the Christmas editions of both it and the TV Times (until they were each able to list all the channels) dating right back to 1974, from such times as when Morecambe and Wise and a Sean Connery James Bond film were still the biggest Christmas Day attractions, such is my compulsion to hang on to my rapidly diminishing memories of my youth, and various other copies that I considered “special” for some reason or other are still scattered around in various other nooks and crannies. I did however have a bit of a clearout over last weekend, and there’s now a load of them from the last twelve months or so just sitting in the recycling bag even as I write this. Now if only I can resist the urge to go a rummaging and rescue a few. Well, you never know when you might need one of those recipes…