The Airfix Zone: Of Men and Their Models
Created | Updated Mar 13, 2007
LATE DECEMBER 2005 (After Christmas and just before New Year)The idea is just beginning to germinate at the back of my bonce and it's putting out tentative litle green feelers.
So it's highly likely this is going to go through a lot of changes and revisions before I send it either for PR or to the UG, depending on which direction it goes in...
It helps that these are the "Days of the Dead" in between Christmas (recent memory)and New Year (yet to arrive)where absolutely nothing happens. There has certainly been next to nothing to do at work - gut a filing cabinet, write a routine letter, et c. Frankly I'd rather be at home, I can get more done and be more productive there. But they want me at work, so sod it, turn up, do what very little needs to be done, get home asap.
Looking at possible areas for new Guide submissions, it occurs to me that one of my passions (plastic kit modelling)has been barely touched upon.....1 As an aspect of the sociology, or perhaps the pathology, of Planet Earth, this thing should be discussed.
A few tentative little headers to build on might be as follows....
What makes men into collectors?
What makes men into modellers?
Where does the drive for perfection come from, and what can we do about it?
How may the sufferer be supported or aided?
What support mechanisms exist? (NB - not necessarily for the afflicted person, who is generally happy enough, but for those around him!)
Seriously, is there a clinical pathology to the modelling and collecting male - possible overlaps with Autism and Aspergers. Is the award-winning modeller a high-functioning autist?
In proposing this, I'm not trying to belittle or make mock of the genuine struggle that Autism-spectrum people have, to make sense of the world and to find a place within it. I've read a lot of the Guide entries on Autism as preparation for this piece, and I hope to reference several. Personal accounts of having Autism, and making sense of the world, tend to be humbling to the outsider. And this Outsider is perfectly serious when he states a belief that the compulsive modeller / collector must have a tinge of Asperger's Syndrome at the very least, to be able to do what they do and to find enjoyment in it.
This researcher writes from the knowledge of having been a collector and modeller of military vehicles and figures since the age of eight... worse, he also wargames. To still be doing (happily) at the age of forty-four those things he did at eight years old.... well, evidence for an arrested personality, at the very least!
To begin with: every man is a collector.
I am using the masculine gender deliberately: while some women also collect, it's not true of all. But all men definitely have the collector gene. Even if it's only a passive or academic form of the gene - high moments in the life of your football club, for instance, or significant dates in the career of your fave rock group - the very fact you've commited the trivia to memory is a form of collecting. Who else would know or even care that Stockport County hold two of the least enviable records in English football2, apart from another Hatter3?
But we should concern ourselves with more tangible forms of collecting. This is where related artefacts are systematically grouped by type, or theme, or other distinguishing characteristics. The actual nature of the artefacts is in some respects not that important (except to the collector) - it's the way they're organised that marks the resulting assemblage as a collection.
Collecting therefore requires three things: there must be a physically tangible accumulation of broadly related artefacts. There must be some sort of organisational principle underpinning the resultant assembly. Most importantly, there has to be a mind at work directing it all and steering everything in broadly the right direction. Model Railways is a good example of where the collecting urge can take you!.
If mangling Hegel is permissible here, a sort of dialectic is at work:-
{That which is collected} plus {Collector} equals {organised collection}.
As stated before, there are as many different types of collection as there are men in this world. Stamps, train numbers, beermats, bottle labels, (indeed the bottles themselves), interesting lepidoptera, threatening arachnids.... but wherever you go, those three principles still hold. (A thing to be collected, a person to do the collecting, and a set of value judgements as to what's important).
Do you think you've never had a collecting urge? What, you've never had a Hornby moment, and set about trying to put your LP/Tape/CD accumulation into alphabetical order by artiste? Or into chronological order by LP date? Ordered by genre? Or by the different band line-ups over the years? Dear reader, it gets to us all....4
On two types of male.....
Yes, it finds us all. And plastic model kits found me, at the age of seven or eight or so. Of course, I blame it on my older brother, when I inherited his collection of completed models and related accessories.
Now, at seven or eight there are two ways a collection of plastic model aircraft can go.
Juvenile Male, Type One, will build kits and he will happily accept other people's built kits, as these save him the labour of having to build his own. However, the build is secondary to the purpose, which is to test out the aerodynamics of a completed plane by lobbing it out of the bedrom window. Just to make it more interesting, Type One male might set light to a wing first, count up to five, and then launch the stricken plane while making "bkkkka-bkkkkka!" machine-gun noises.
Type One Male will also thoroughly investigate the possibilities of combining completed tank kits, as well as plastic figure sets, with freely available November fireworks.
To a Type One, it is not the model but the mode of destruction that counts. Type One Juvenile Males tend to grow up into hearty outgoing extroverts with healthy social and sporting interests: typical Type Ones who admit to having tested completed plastic models to destruction include radio presenter and music hack Stuart Maconie.
I do have to admit to trying out Type One behaviour when my brother's models came my way. But it was oddly unsatisying and felt in some unfathomable way like sacrilege, and it very definitely felt mean: Older Brother had put time into making these kits and I was destroying them as if his work and care didn't count for much? It somehow felt ignorant. I also noted that he said nothing about the loss in combat of his Ju88 (crashed into the back garden as a flamer)but had a slightly hurt look on his face all the same. (Our mother said some harsher words privately, later on).
OK, so I was too thick to work it out at once. But being in some compensatory ways quite bright, I'd worked out the flaws involved in trying to "glide" completed model aircraft and understood why it wasn't going to work. They were too small; the weight distribution was wrong; real aircraft had a power source and working control surfaces and a pilot to make split-second decisions and alterations. Without those, of course the models would crash and burn or flip over onto their backs and stall right out of the air.
So I called a halt to wrecking and elected to preserve Older Brother's collection, so far as I could. It was amazing how the guilt evaporated, once I chose to be Preserver rather than Destroyer.
I could do nothing about the wrecks apart from promise to replace them: but I'd made an even more monumental life choice. I had opted to become a Type Two Juvenile Male.
The Type Two Juvenile Male is more thoughtful, introverted, imaginative, quieter, than the Type One. Again we come to the uneasy interface between "normality" and "Aspergers", as the characteristics of the Type Two are also those of the autism/Aspergers person.
Let's see: the Type Two will enjoy building the model for its own sake. He will take every effort to make it look good and as accurate a representation as he can. He will read up on the background and the history of the prototype he is modelling.He will know where the subject fits into its own historical context. He will ensure he has all the tools, paints, et c he needs to make the model look good. All moving and working parts will be made to move and work. Afterwards, the completed model will be stored away with love and cherished in years to come. The inanimate thing will be treated with more pride and more significance than any mere human can hope to gain from the Type Two Modeller. After all, the completed work is His: there are none of the messy compromises or misleading indicators or double standards or generally messy, confused, interactions that you get with people, and which aggravate because "you can never work people out in the same way you can a decent instruction leaflet. Damn it, where's the instruction leaflet for setting up and dealing with women, for goodness sake?"
Hmmm. Why do I feel as if I'm reeling off a whole list of dignostic indicators for Aspergers here?
And there isn't a great gulf between Type One and Type Two males. It's perfectly possible to have aspects of both: I was OK at sports in school, and the wife assures me that I can interact with women and successfully imitate a human being to the point where, as with a Turing test, it's impossible to tell a difference.
1The nearest the Guide appears to get is How To Build Models. I was a bit dissappointed to find somebody else had had the idea before me, then realised Pink Ferret was going at it "straight", leaving the sideways questioning approach open for me to exploit!2The heaviest defeat in English professional football; they once lost a game 2-26.Note for Americans: a typical football(soccer) score might be 2-1 or 3-1. It is very, very, rare for a score of higher than 5-0 to be recorded and only once in a blue moon does the winning margin get into double figures. County also have the record for the lowest-ever attendance at an English League game. Just 13 people paid to see them lose to Doncaster Rovers in 1941. This was compounded by County's homely Edgely Park ground having been bombed by the Luftwaffe - in 1941 they were ground-sharing at Old Trafford with mighty Manchester United. Imagine 13 people turning up here...3A "Hatter" is a Stockport County fan. As in "mad as a....", and the town's former high standing in the millinery trade. 4Refer to Underguide article Non Timetus Messor, also by this researcher, for a classic example of "collecting" a favourite band...
