On Toys For Old Men

An old man died in the house I currently live in. Although the smell has now dissipated, what remains is his kooky, child of the ’20s, taste in mail order catalogues.

I’ve seen vibrators, bags to attach to the end of your cock, waterproof bedding, animal blankets, weak-looking padlocks… A whole load of tat. A whole load of tat.

But the one pictured above I have never seen before.

It contains about sixty pages advertising toy cars, trucks, lorries and buses. They all retail for approximately twenty pounds and all look like their manufacturing costs were significantly below twenty pence.

What bothers me is the value. For anyone genuinely interested in collecting these things as collectable objects: they look awful. For anyone buying them as things to play with: they’re pretty overpriced for what you’re getting.

Which leads me to wonder… Are the pensioned men of Islington squandering their allowances on low quality collectables, or instead lavishing funds on slightly-bigger-than-normal toys?

And old men famously don’t like being on the floor. So if they play with them, do they play with them on tables? Are there old men, all over the country, whizzing  models of the Kenworth W900 With Crane back and forth across some tatty pine furniture?

Yes. The answer is clearly yes.