LIFE'S RICH PATTERN
Collector’s Edition BY LIZ FOSTER
Who here has never collected anything? From beetles, to butterflies, cicada shells to pressed flowers, our childhoods are full of precious memories associated with this or that time and place. Illustration by Grace Kopsiaftis My own collection was stamps. Yes, pretty boring I know but I really enjoyed the lucky dip mystery box bundles from the stamp club. If nothing else, I’m the one to have on your Trivia team (who here knows what country is Magyar, huh?) The best stamps were the sets. I didn’t realise they only held value if they were postmarked, so I carefully hoarded my pocket money and bought the Royal Mail Twelve Days of Christmas collection (circa 1977) and stuck them in, waiting with bated breath for the price to rise. The album was passed on to my now 31-year-old niece and vanished soon afterwards (turns out she wasn’t a stamp fan). Whether it’s now part of a real enthusiast’s collection or got shredded at the local tip, I guess we’ll never know. Compare that to the guy who rocked up to the Antiques Roadshow a few years back with some trinkets he’d just picked up at a car boot sale for £2.26. Let’s face it, we only watch that show for the collective oohs and aahs when the little old lady finds out the ugly china dog is worth thousands (rule of thumb for maximum oohs is that the price must top 5 figures – in pounds. Anything topping 6 figures produces reverential silence). The buttons turned out to be Faberge, valued at over £1,500. ‘They’ve been in the family for forty hours,’ the owner said proudly. Gen Xers put great store by their proud ranks of first vinyl albums and then CDs (alphabetical order only). New fads come and go, but manufacturers must beware being viewed through 2021 enviro eyes, as Woollies discovered to their PR cost during the recent Ooshie craze. The timeless collectible remains trading cards, which were so much more than pictures to be viewed from behind glass frames. Half the fun was swapping them with your mate who had several Maradonnas but no Peles. 10 TVO
But what’s old is new. According to a report by eBay on the top trading card trends for 2021, there’s been a 142% surge in domestic sales globally with a 379% growth of sales to Australia. I guess that’s what people were doing during lockdown, though it’s not quite the same as the playground swap. Pokémon, that perennial, weird, under your skin character, headed the world table with a whopping 574% growth in trading cards from 2019 to 2020. And a new appreciation for collecting physical big game tickets, like the Superbowl, is emerging post pandemic. You can thank e-personalities - YouTubers and influencers - for ensuring Pokémon cards are experiencing shortages akin to the PlayStation 5 (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it), and scalpers are buying out entire shipments and stocks of the cards for resale. The Pokémon Company can’t print them fast enough. There’s something in that. Being an Influencer is a thing now, an actual job, like being a butcher or a teacher. But it’s not a job I’m likely to succeed in. A quick google revealed the full Twelve Days stamp presentation pack on eBay for £3.99. Given the combined face value of the stamps and allowing for inflation I am pretty sure this wouldn’t have represented a top buy. You never know. Maybe this copy of TVO will be worth a bob or two in years to come.
Liz Foster is a local writer and author. You can find more Life’s Rich Pattern features and more at
www.lizfosterwriter.com
