In late 1997, I was moving to a new rented room in Boston, and my friend Karen, who I'd somehow convinced to help me move, observed "Ben, for someone who's lived a short little life like you, you haven't half accumulated a lot of shit!" That was the best part of twenty years ago, and I don't think I've thrown anything away since then.
I mention it for two reasons - firstly, this week's Big Bang Theory featured Sheldon admitting that he keeps everything he's ever owned in a storage locker (further proving that the character of Sheldon Cooper is based on me and that I deserve either a huge amount of money or a passing mention on an episode that Amy has a poster of three times world memory champion Ben Pridmore on her bedroom wall), and secondly, I'm in the process of arranging to move to a smaller place in Redditch, and I need to do something with my comic collection.
I've got somewhere in the region of 3000 comics (I'm still working on counting them up), and they're basically worthless (the handful of valuable ones I've ever owned have been sold in the past when I needed money, but the vast majority of comics I buy are the kind that nobody else would want to pay for). They take up a fair bit of space, and I should really get rid of them. Problem is, I'm not sure that anyone would consider buying them; we don't live in an age where comic collecting is a profitable thing to do. And I don't really like the idea of giving the whole lot of them away - it sort of goes against my principles. The same goes for all my books and all my video tapes. But I'm really going to need to do something, even if it's just renting a storage locker for them all...
