Collector

Back in 2003 I was at an air display at Duxford near Cambridge. As is the case at these events there were many stalls where visiting retailers attempted to sell you their wares. Most of those were aviation and military related and a number were selling aircraft models. At one I was glancing through the products when one in particular caught my eye. It was a 1:400 scale diecast metal model of Delta Airlines MD-11 N812DE. Now, whilst that might appear to be a lot of avgeek gobbledegook to you, to me it just so happened to be a model of a specific aircraft I’d flown in the previous year, from Gatwick to Atlanta just in case you were wondering. That looks quite nice I thought and handed over twenty quid to the bloke behind the table on which the box in which it was contained had been placed. I took it home, removed it from its box and proudly displayed it on the desk next to the computer. So began a bit of an obsession with diecast model aircraft, one that has only recently ended though in truth it had been tailing off over the past five or six years. As a hobby, collecting diecast aircraft is a bit rubbish really. All you have to do is find the ones you want, buy them then display them. It involves absolutely no physical exercise whatsoever and doesn’t really make your brain work, other than working out ways to justify the cost. At the height of my collecting I’d be buying several models a month. The four or five manufacturers of these models tended to release new ones every month and inevitably there would be something in those releases that I fancied. There was also the little job of finding models released earlier which meant I was something of a slave to ebay for a while. I couldn’t collect everything of course, that would have been absurd, but I developed my own collecting criteria and stuck to it. More or less. After a few years I started collecting 1:200 scale models too. Contrary to popular opinion these are not simply twice as big as their 1:400 counterparts, they take up four times as much shelf space and are actually eight times as big. More to the point they are generally about three times the price – a 747 for example might set you back £40 in 1:400 and £120 in 1:200 at today’s prices. Models were a bit cheaper ten years ago at the height of my collecting but it’s fair to say that a significant chunk of my salary would disappear every month to fuel this ‘rubbish’ hobby. Not only that, as my collection increased it wasn’t long before I ran out of display space. As a consequence, the vast majority of my models are stored in their boxes in the loft. I decided to stop actively collecting last year by which time I had amassed 434 1:400 scale, 79 1:200 scale and seven other scale diecast models, all meticulously catalogued on a spreadsheet of course. With the exception of a few military transport aircraft, all are civilian airliners.

You sometimes get programmes on the telly which focus on collectors. Programme makers particularly like collectors of railway memorabilia and will find some chap whose collection of station nameplates, old buffers and semaphore signals that takes up three rooms in his house and both his garden sheds. They will interview his long-suffering wife and generally be slightly patronising towards him (it is always a him, never a her) and make out he’s a bit of a saddo. There is, however, something addictive about collecting. Once I started I couldn’t really stop until I’d got everything that fitted my collecting criteria, even knowing that I’d nowhere to display the damn things once they arrived. So yes, perhaps I am a bit of a saddo. That being said, I do like seeing them on the shelf and change the thirty or so that I can display at any one time every few months. As you know, I am an avgeek and they remind me of flights I’ve taken, the aircraft I grew up with and indeed those of the 50s and 60s which I find particularly fascinating. Other than that they just sit there doing nothing.

So why have I decided to ‘come out’ as a diecast collector saddo today? You can blame Pebbles for that. Pebbles is one of our two cats. She is fourteen years old and basically does nothing but sleep all day. Every once in a while though she gets a flea up her arse and starts haring round the house. This episode lasts a couple of minutes before she wanders back to one of her favourite sleeping destinations. Last night I was in the kitchen making the tea when I heard a bit of a crash. What’s that bloody cat doing I thought. I went upstairs, into the office and found a model on the floor. Not only that it just so happened to be that Delta Airlines MD-11 that had kick started my collection seventeen years ago. The tail and centre engine was detached – some of the more aviation savvy amongst you might realise why I immediately thought of Sioux City – and when I picked up the fuselage the wings fell off. Of all the models she could have targeted. I nearly shed a tear. I say nearly, I didn’t really, I was too busy cursing the cat despite her not being there any more. It was a reasonably easy fix. Wood glue, of which I have a bottle for just such an occasion, is strong enough to reattach the various bits and not too strong that it won’t come apart again if you need to adjust things. It will never be really ‘mint’ again though. Cooking fat. To prevent repetitions of this incident I could get rid of either my entire collection or the cat. It’s a tricky one. Too tricky to solve I think so I’ll probably end up keeping both.