It has been a few days since I last cracked a fat over anything but thankfully the wife I never had, DougalMougal, has made me see the error of my ways and reminded me that with great power comes great responsibility. Well he didn’t say that in so many words. Or any of those words actually, in fact I made that entire bit up.
I’ve actually been busy finishing the biggest bag of Twisties I’ve ever seen. No not really but actually that’s not so far from the truth. My son, ClubDes Junior, is collecting the rugby cards you find in the chippie packets these days and shit has been getting serious. I’ve eaten so many potato chips I now bleed when I poo. Those cards are playground currency I tell you and they’re more valuable than cold hard cash. The kids won’t even accept cash for them actually, the only legal tender they recognise is a 5cm square bit of plastic with some meathead on the front.
It wasn’t long before Junior soon became a Don of the playground with his mega collection, thanks to my pimping the crew at ClubDes for their cards from the packets they’ve been getting out of the vending machine in the hall. What started out as a harmless bit of helping out the boy though has quickly become a race to see whose kid can get the full set first between me and the Hard Out Harry parents of the Saffa he’s best mates with.
Initially their Mum was having none of it because her boys were ripping through the packets and not actually eating the chips and if there is one thing that rips the undies of a Saffa it’s wasted money, but as soon as she got a sniff of competition then shit really kicked off. Typical bloody Saffas. I wonder if they’ll consider a winner takes all competition to see whose cable contains the most chip fragments, theirs or mine.
All of this reminds me of my school days spent collecting trading cards. Back in my day you got bubblegum with your cards. It tasted like crap and lasted about all of four chews and was made from jandal cutoffs but we didn’t care because it was all about the cards. Batman, Ninja Turtles, WWF, Rugby League – you name it we collected it. The token Indian boy at my school, because there really weren’t that many back then, always got the whole set first because his Dad owned the local diary and he bought boxes of the stuff from wholesalers. You see that’s the secret to buying trading cards, as I would later learn whilst in the early days of my inauguration to the world of comic book shop geekdom, because each box is guaranteed to contain a full set plus rare cards.
There was no flogging rare shit off on Trade Me back then either, you begged, borrowed or stole your way to a whole set in those days and I stole anything that wasn’t tied down. I remember fleecing all the girls in 2nd form of their Neighbours cards, not because I collected them but just because I could. I was exempt from the suspicion of the theft too on account of being a fella and no fella would have been caught dead with Neighbours cards. Who collects Neighbours cards, I mean really? My sister did and she got the whole set too.
I reckon my violating of the girls collections stemmed from the fact that I had been burnt before with trading cards. Karma had paid me a visit earlier in ’86 when me and Willie Gee went halvsies in the Soccer World Cup collectors set. There were 52 playing cards to collect and through our collective resources we scored the lot, including the four very rare ace cards. Once we had the set we took turns in holding on to them for a week, laying them out, admiring them, that kind of thing. We were too young back then to know how to have a jimmy but you can bet if did we would have over them, they were that good.
Only they went missing onetime whilst on Willie’s watch and I never ever saw them again. It was very nearly the end of a beautiful friendship. They were good cards too dammit and I’d be living of the profits of having sold them cards today if I had them, not that I’d ever sell them. But they’d be my retirement plan. Willie lives up in the Coromandal these days cultivating the ganja. I bet he sold those cards for a bag of fertiliser or something. I got mine back in later years though when I pinched half his G.I.Joe collection.
Ah well. That’s life and you’ve just got to get on with things really. As I write this Junior only needs three cards to collect the set while Saffaboy needs only the one. It’s gonna be a close call. Maybe I should break into their house and steal his…
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