13. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...BROOKE BOND TEA CARDS

The absolute very first time I began collecting stuff was, being a boy, probably 10 minutes after I learned to talk. It’s in our DNᴀ. What may not be in our DNᴀ is the obsessive lengths I’ve taken it to over the years. When you’ve got an attic full of games like Totopoly, Haunted House, Battling Tops and Treasure of the Pharaohs, none of which have survived from my childhood and all of which have been bought off eBay in the last couple of years and never played, you know there’s something wrong.

I think it was Brooke Bond Tea Cards which started the whole thing off. My mum would hand me the packet of PG Tips she’d bought as though it was a Christmas present (I think one year it actually was). We weren’t a big family of tea-drinkers so she would buy the smallest pack size, meaning just a solitary card had been slid down the inside of the carton. Not yet a fully-fledged atheist at 6 yrs old (I was a late developer), I would allow myself a little prayer for the card to be one of those missing from my album. It usually wasn’t. There were always a few which had lower print runs than the rest because the Marketing people at Brooke Bond were sneaky bastards. Regardless of that (or perhaps because of it), it was an experience of Willy Wonka Golden Ticket proportions.

Incidentally, the packs were not that difficult to open in-store for a more frequent and cheaper way of feeding the collecting addiction and, although I never tried this myself, I suspect I put enough pressure on my poor mother to give it a go. Before long though, Brooke Bond started to wrap the packs in cellophane and that was that. I told you those bastards were sneaky.

News of the meteoric rise in PG Tips sales clearly reached the petrol stations because I remember taking a similar approach with my Dad when it came to Shell’s wildlife 3-D cards. It didn’t matter that there were several other petrol stations closer to us than Shell, nor that all of these were considerably cheaper, I NEEDED TO FIND THE CHEETAH TO COMPLETE MY SET so Dad had to drive to the Shell one to fill up. End of.

The disappointment of finding a duplicate was slightly eased by the knowledge that you could usually persuade Richard and Rupert, a pair of twins at my primary school whose family were clearly phenomenal tea drinkers, to part with the prize target cards or coins in return for any old rubbish you happened to have on offer: a few chipped marbles, a couple of conkers or, if I really wanted the trade, a partially-eaten curly wurly. I think I even convinced them to accept a pet rock as collateral once. I hadn't even bothered to draw a face on it.

Collecting anything which has a limited and numbered series is a nightmare because, if you have OCD (ie you’re a boy), it’s impossible to stop until you’ve ticked off each one in the set (by recording it in the secret notebook which you still carry around today and you hide from your wife even if it makes her think you’re either having an affair or covering up a porn addiction instead). Damn, TMI.

I was indiscriminate in my collecting: Weetabix freebies and anything which had "neat wheat mate" written on it ("ok?"), Mr Men books (on the one hand I was a teenager by then but, on the other, there was a set of stuff just begging to be collected), those ridiculously over-priced weekly magazine series where you got the 2nd issue 'free' with the first because that drew you into buying all 150 issues and ending up effectively paying nearly a hundred quid for a book you could find in Oxfam for 25p. "Unexplained"? Yep, definitely.

The most expensive hobby of mine, though, was collecting Marvel superhero comics which were published in the 60s in the US. My first copies were gifted to me by my friend, Christopher, from primary school. Strictly speaking, he only ‘showed’ them to me after tea at his house but I knew what he was really saying and so slipped them into my satchel before his mum drove me home.

Over the years, I built an impressive collection of early Avengers and X-Men comics. They soon became recognised as an investment vehicle to rival stamps & coins and I had a choice of selling either my comics or my Smiths singles to finance my time at college. With values growing nicely but likely to plateau, I plumped for the comics and sold them for three grand to a dodgy dealer in Stoke-on-Trent. Sadly, this rate of growth only accelerated in subsequent years, fuelled by the success of the superhero films, and my original collection would now have been able to buy me a 3 bedroom flat in Kensington. Instead, back in the 80s, it barely lasted a year of college and was mostly sprayed up the back wall of the urinals in the Baron of Beef.

On the plus side, I have managed to hang on to my original Smiths singles. Their investment track record, as those who've read my earlier post on Morrissey already know, has been a little on the disappointing side but, whilst they wouldn’t quite cover the price of that 3 bed flat (and some guy from Stoke secured it anyway), they’d certainly look nice on the walls.

I reckon I've largely conquered my OCD but it's possible I've simply renamed it. I call it logical to arrange all my books and CDs in alphabetical order (even the ones in the loft) because, the one time my family persuaded me to dispense with this tried and tested system and 'go random', my daughter admitted that looking for her Dickens GCSE set text was like trying to find a needle in a haystack (ok, strictly speaking she said my book collection was not exactly the British Library and it only took her two minutes but you get my point?).

My other name for this affliction is nostalgia. The 24 Dr Who promotional cards from Weetabix (I’ve got 21 so far)? Nostalgia. The 11 figures in the Ray Harryhausen set from Japan (he's the special effects guy for Jason and the Argonauts, Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans etc)? Nostalgia. The 12 Third Eye Marvel black light posters which glow under ultra-violet light (and which I've rigged up a whole system in one of the downstairs rooms to show them to best effect when I'm on a zoom call)? OK, that might be taking things a little too far.

And wouldn't life be easier (well, far more nostalgic at least) if we could trade these things on eBay for some chipped marbles and a few old conkers? Don't worry, I wouldn't be mad enough to part with my curly wurly this time round though, partially-eaten or not.

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Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME......YOUNG ONES