Collection

Tonight I spent several hours sorting out pocket calendars with my mother. Officially it's my collection, but for the past three years it has been maintained by my mother. I haven't touched them for a couple of years.

It's amazing how someone can enjoy this. Imagine thousands dusty cards stored in shoe boxes. First we divide them into topics. Then within one topic we sort them by year. Then within each year we look for calendars that are double. Those go into exchange boxes. After we removed all the doubles within one topic we take the album with that topic and start comparing 'new' calendars and the calendars in that album. We remove the doubles again. We put the rest of the 'new' calendars into the album. Sorting out one large topic (like airplanes and air companies) can take a couple of days.

Collecting is a strange hobby in the first place. Collecting pocket calendars is plain weird. When friends ask me to show my collection I never refuse. But the attention span of a normal human being is usually not long enough to browse through more than two albums. After that I recognise the terror in their eyes when they realise they will have to spend the night looking at my calendars if I insist on showing the entire collection.

Well, you may think I'm weird - I don't care. I've just spent two hours looking at dusty pictures and I am happy!



A calendar from Thailand-->