Doctor Who Blasphemy: Curating Your Collection of Tat

This is going to be sacrilege to some Doctor Who fans, but over the past few years I’ve been curating my Doctor Who collection. I found I just didn’t want to have boxes of plastic figures piled up in my attic anymore. I didn’t want shelves of books I was never going to reread. I didn’t want the one Dalek Funko pop that made me feel horrendously guilty because omg, I bought a Funko Pop (on the bright side, it didn’t have a dead black eye staring at me, and this was a character where that would have been legit; it had a rather nice shade of dead blue eye instead.)

This wasn’t a massive clear-out condemning decades of collecting to the bin. It’s been a very long, slow process, as part of a realisation that I really really wanted less Stuff. Not in a minimalist way, but in a mindful way. I found decluttering very calming, and having less stuff even more calming. And when I looked at my Doctor Who collection, there was definitely A Lot of Stuff, and while some of it I loved, a lot of it just did the dust on shelves making me feel guilty about how dusty it was, or the sitting in the boxes in the attic thing. There wasn’t room for it elsewhere. And those boxes just kept whispering at my brain, in the vein of some sort of horror film where the little plastic figures were going to come alive and kill me if I didn’t set them free.

…okay, that’s a lie. But it did increasingly bother me. It’s a weird set of feelings, knowing that those figures brought me so much joy, knowing how much fun I had collecting them, and also realising I didn’t want to hold on to them any longer. I didn’t regret buying them (cf the joy), but my fannishness had changed. This was not the way I expressed it any more.

That’s not to say I intend a complete absence of Doctor Who tat. My beloved Eaglemoss collection of sixties monsters; my 1993 TARDIS tin; one or two Character Options TARDISes…there are plenty of things that aren’t going anywhere, but I don’t want anything that’s going to be kept in storage, hidden away from some future moment just in case I really, really need an emergency scouting party of remote control Daleks (three, I had three of them. WHY. Well, because they were magnificent toys and in different colour schemes, but still.)

This was actually meant to be a post about my first Doctor Who stories. It stopped being about that when I picked up the first Doctor Who VHS I ever owned (another thing that’s definitely staying) and thought about the me who received that as a Christmas gift from Santa back in the nineties. And I thought about how much she loved Doctor Who, and how she would have looked at all this stuff I had, and how confused she’d be that I didn’t want so much of it any more. I think the me in her twenties who was most passionately collecting this stuff would be horrified.

It’s very disconcerting when you realise who you are as a person has changed. Even if that way is just that you’d like a smaller collection of stuff to do with your most beloved telly show. I suppose because Doctor Who has been such a pillar in my life for as long as I can remember that I initially felt like I was committing treason against it. That I was somehow less of a fan because I wanted less stuff (yeah, late-stage capitalism got to me, shush). That not owning a few hundred books written in the nineties that I was never going to read made me less of a fan. God, that’s weird when I type it out, the idea of equating love of a creative work with how much stuff you own.

And when you change, and your environment doesn’t, that creates a sort of friction that I prefer not to leave unresolved. It also makes you aware that you’ve lost something, in the way that when there is change there’s always loss in some form or another.

This is not me being against vast and awesome collections. Not if they make you happy. Not if they’re want you want. Indeed, I’m delighted to have a look at other people’s collections, there’s a heck of a lot of cool Doctor Who merch out there. I suppose I’m feeling a little melancholy this morning, and picking up that VHS made me melancholy and reflective. (I blame the melancholy entirely on forgetting to wear my glasses and suffering through an eye-gouging migraine yesterday.)

You change a lot in ways you don’t notice, but when you’re curating a beloved collection, it really does feel like you’re saying goodbye to parts of yourself before you wrap them in boxes and send them out the door to, hopefully, someone who will take as much joy in them as you once did.