The UKA Blog:

It's been a pretty busy couple of month's around here. Rachel has relocated from London, I'm snowed under with work and in between we've had a London Expo, as the excellent blog by Andy covers so well.

I was there too of course, but for me Expo is 2 things - a chance to meet up with some old friends (and even making new ones) and shopping. You can see one of my recent purchases reviewed here.

However, with Rachel moving in, even my spacious bachelor pad has been condensed to make room for my beautiful partner. In one sense, it's not been too hard to achieve since the spare room is now a very modern and comfortable office, and my things can be stored in here. However, with the bedroom split between us and the lounge off limits, display space has been considerably reduced.

So that makes picking up new stuff somewhat harder to justify, especially as I have to consider my money our money now.

This has lead to two revelations - one, I own a huge amount of anime/Transformer figures that need to be relocated, and two, I still want more of them.

It's also been a bit of a revelation as to my own obsession with "plastic crack" as I'm addicted to acquiring it, even though I don't really want too much of it in the office and I don't have much room elsewhere for it (on display at least).

I consider the main acid test of whether I want something on display to be my imagined reaction to my parents or clients seeing it. Do I really want a figure of a cute girl on my desk, much less a KO Shockwave figure which stands at 8"? I might think it's cool, but just how childish is it really?

Now, I have a glass cabinet in the office, one of those freestanding rectangular jobs from Ikea, and I'm trying to keep it all confined to the cabinet, and maybe 3 other figures somewhere around the office. The cabinet has 3 shelves, and I have to rotate what I have - if it won't go in the cabinet, it has to be either sold or stored. This has been pretty damned difficult.

Shelf 1 contains my 2 Porsche models - a simple 996, and the Porsche 935 Le Mans model which is worth a bomb, so that's one shelf gone.

Shelf 2 contains the first movie Batmobile, small Wall-E & Mo figures, and two die-cast Macross Plus Valkyries. No more room there either.

Finally shelf 3 is the Transformer shelf - how do you choose between over 100 cherished toys? Well so far I've opted for all 5 WST Dinobots, Alternity Silver Prime, Masterpiece Grimlock, THS02 Optimus Prime and a large Haruhi model, just to break it up a bit. Blimey.

As Kevin and I have discussed, our generation is probably the first where we haven't had to grow up. Not really. Toys have become "collectibles", and as such an industry exists to cater to our needs, further legitimising the need some of us have to acquire these bizarre, often exquisite rarities. I'm not sure at what age I'm going to have to become a "proper adult", but at 30 I'm starting to see a need to cut down.

As we all get older, it becomes harder to find homes for our beloved possessions. I for one am not quite ready to grow up yet, so my office has become a curious mix of both my profession and my childhood.

Maybe that's why I feel so comfortable in it ^_^