Toe in the Water

Trinkets

Trinkets

I have to admit that I cannot resist collecting trinkets. Don’t ask me why I do so - I really don’t know why. As far as I can see, they have no use apart from being something we can collect. And there is something in me that enforces the collection of worthless objects.

Years ago, when I still served the god Nicotine, I smoked a brand that brought out a series of collector’s cards. These had the theme of important monuments in America and I kinda liked ‘em. That’s all. They weren’t astoundingly beautiful or noteworthy in any way - they just presented themselves as a target, to collect the full set.

So I did exactly that. It wasn’t a huge set and the cigarette company soon stopped producing them. I found myself with several sets of the cards, neatly stacked in order and sitting on my computer desk, waiting for me to think of a use for them.

I never managed that supreme effort of the imagination. In the end, they disappeared into a drawer and, in the course of some move or other, they vanished forever.

Over the years the same pattern has often repeated itself. For a while I was fascinated by advertisers’ photographs of credit cards they were pushing. Something about those clever photos, gleaming in their metallic colours and taken from ever more inventive angles, attracted me and I started copying them to the hard drive. For all I know, they still abide somewhere on some computer long put out to grass in a dark and dusty cupboard (ooh, delightful mixed metaphor!).

When I was very young, before the age of eleven in fact, I collected china figurines of horses. Again, I don’t know what started me on that. But they were all lost, broken in the great move from Cape Town to Zimbabwe and unmourned for even a moment. Collections have great allure while I’m amassing them, but lose their magic very quickly.

And now I collect trinkets. It’s almost a forbidden pleasure, sneaking in and grabbing another one, as though it were somehow forbidden. Perhaps that’s part of the attraction.


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