Between 1995 and 1997, I managed to buy around 200 seven inch singles. With no financial responsibilities and a disposable income from washing dishes two nights a week, I was able to get the bus into town every Saturday to go to Rock-a-boom and pick up the latest releases. Most new singles were 99p and as such it was a very sustainable habit.
I became a collector and by collector I mean a person who feels incomplete without a certain possession. Collecting goes deep into the soul. Your collection fits the absence you have in yourself. A non-Collector is someone who is satisfied with themselves, a person without obsessions, who doesn’t want to eclipse the boundaries of their self. Collectors are interesting characters, but sometimes their collection can get out of hand. When the collection becomes more important than what it represents, then you are in serious trouble.
Looking back, I guess that this is what happened to me. I stopped buying singles because I wanted them and started buying them for the sake of completion. Some of the ones I bought - for as little as 20p from charity shops - were so bad that I don’t think I even managed to listen to the whole thing. But they went into the collection, alphabetised then chronologised.
When I went to University I could only take a small cassette radio and my collecting habit turned to books. The records lived in a couple of shoeboxes in my parents’ house, dusted down on holidays to be spliced into compilations. Eventually I recovered them, listened to a few and then put them up in our loft. And now I am going to sell them. I hope I don’t regret it.
Already I took my vinyl albums to a Mixed Up records on Otago Lane, receiving a paltry £20 for twelve really good records. I felt like I was being diddled, but perhaps the cost of being the type of person who is forced to care about such things is worth being diddled.
To me, the records are deadweight, despite the numerous curious memories between their grooves. They tie me down, tie down the personality to a conception of self that is no longer relevant. The person I was then doesn’t live here anymore, to persist in the lie would be dishonest.
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Well done. I think I would personally do well from a collecting disorder, because my powers of association with ‘real life’ are incredibly badly attuned and cause me obsession and grief even while not being relevant to anyone’s anything.
However, this kind of rejection is always a healthy thing. Having so much of an A-to-B associative reference with no external stimulus and such a low level of decision-making is worse than watching daytime TV in terms of enslaving the brain.
If you can spend 10% more purpose on the rest of your life (and you may not even notice), something truly worthwhile has happened.
Hi Barney!
I fear that my collecting has merely moved into other areas — from football stickers to vinyl to books to fonts — perhaps anyone who has a voracious appetite for culture can find themselves irrationally drawn to one particular thing.