Family’s Collective Behaviour

Recent news that a copy of Detective Comics #27, which marks the debut of Batman, sold at auction for more than $1 million must have our many oddball Australian collectors salivating.

I always considered my family rather sane and therefore immune from this affliction until we experienced the late-onset case of an Aunt, whom, in her early eighties, suddenly and without any warning stopped knitting and started collecting and was so dedicated to making up for lost time, that, within weeks, she proudly showed us her first album packed with sugar-sachets and a rather largish rack of souvenir spoons.

She laboriously accumulated these items, some fifty years before the advent of Ebay, by having coffee in the many establishments that then offered personalized sugar-sachets and by travelling on public transport to neighbouring villages and towns chasing new souvenir spoons.

This quickly led to the start of a third collection, this one of timetables for trains and buses.

The cost of the outings must have soon outstripped her meagre widow’s pension and she apparently began pinching multiple sachets as she had discovered the benefits of the so-called “Swap Meets”.

Later still she befriended commercial travelers and they brought her sachets from far and wide. A representative from a printing firm even went as far as having one custom made. It purported to be from Hotel “The Pissing Goat” with matching illustration and this immediately became her pride and joy and soon had fellow collectors green with envy.

When Auntie died, aged 89, of a heart attack on a bus early one morning she had already bagged four new spoons (as noted in the Coroner’s report).

The curse of these genes struck last year when, on a holiday in France, I could not resist the urge to start a collection of cast iron sewage pit covers, found everywhere in older cities, with many depicting the multi-headed hound Cerberus, guardian of the underworld.

I managed to purchase one such lid in a scrap-yard and had to fight the terrible temptation to “collect” other splendid examples in the middle of the night by simply levering them off their pits.

Sadly I had to abandon my prized triple-headed Cerberus lid – and my dreams of starting a collection- at Charles the Gaulle Airport when an airline check-in chick showed scant regard for art and history, silently pointed at the scales which showed 145 kilos, refused to classify it “hand-luggage” despite my offer to roll it onboard myself and store it under my seat, and then, still not smiling, muttered: “Mille deux cent Euro”.

I thought I was cured of collecting forever but in unguarded moments I often find myself wondering what happened to Auntie’s spoons.

Have a happy Christmas everyone and look forward to a great 2011