Friday 1 November 2019

What’s with LEGO?


What’s with LEGO?

The "project"
My experience with Lego is probably the same as most adults. It was a thing we bought our kids thinking they were old enough to build something that they were having a passing obsession with, then we ended up building the whole kit because the kids really weren’t that old enough to follow the instructions or have the attention span/patience to see the build through to the end.
Then a few weeks later it would be in a million pieces again and we as parents would find every piece by stepping on it in bare feet at any given time of the day in any given room. Basically, you repeat this with several kits until it all ends up under the bed in a big plastic container all mixed together with all the instructions missing with a stray piece escaping to remind us that Lego is instinctively made by evil Scandinavian monsters (probably the same ones behind IKEA kit furniture) to punish us.
I haven’t had to worry about Lego and its attraction to the soles of my feet for quite a while now that the kids are all grown and moved away, but recently, due to an art project I had to collect a certain amount of different coloured bricks to construct a model, then complete it with printed instructions and box. It was then going to be a gift for a long time associate.
There was no way I was going to ask any of my children if they still had their containers of Lego, let alone dredge through said boxes looking for the 184 pieces needed to commence my project. Lucky for me there is a shop in Bayswater Toy Bricks that sells deconstructed kits that have been sorted by colour into trays that you can sort through yourself. While this sounds easy, allow yourself some time and powerful glasses because all lego bricks come in a million different styles and the black ones all seem to melt together after five minutes of searching. Anyhow, after a long search I was 14 specific bricks short. This wasn’t the shop’s fault or my bad eyes, apparently people come in all the time and plunder these trays and I may have come in on a wrong day. I asked the lady behind the counter if by chance they sold individual bricks, which they did but only the more popular styles and the ones I needed didn’t fit that category. However, she said, it was my lucky day. On the following Sunday, next to the Council offices in Bayswater, the Senor Citizens Centre was the venue for A Toy Brick Market where there would at least 200,000 loose Lego pieces available. If what I wanted wasn’t there, it didn’t exist. This was great news because I was on a timeline to finish my project, the only downside was it was only between 9.00 am and Noon. Those hours are ok any other day of the week, but Sunday?
sunday 9.10Am Bayseter
That Sunday, being committed to the project, I rejected any notion of a sleep-in and a late breakfast and set off to find the elusive missing pieces of Lego. I gathered that I’d get there about 10 past 9 to allow the poor people setting up to drag their feet a bit and get the sleep out of their eyes. Pulling into the car park I couldn’t have been more mistaken. I was lucky that someone had already found their Holy Grail pieces and left the already full carpark as I drove in, I could feel the curses of the cars that had followed me in.  There were people everywhere. Mostly parents with children but still a great representation of the population in general. There was even a coffee van set up near the hall entrance to cater for those like me not familiar with this Sunday time zone. Or then again it could just be a Melbourne thing being the coffee consumption capital of the world.
In here there were treasures

On entering the hall I was amazed at the crowd this early in the morning and there had to be at least 150 bodies in there all digging through trays of coloured bricks and looking at second-hand kits in original boxes and other completely made models all vying for new owners. I gave the people at the door my gold coin donation as an entry fee and proceeded to sift through the trays with other people as desperate as me to find that one brick. There was none of this crazy, Boxing Day Sale pushing and shoving it was all politeness and order and within five minutes I had exactly what I was looking for and some extras just for good measure, then on the way out I bought a little Dr Who Dalek because it looked cool. At the checkout, there were a lot of happy people holding all manner of kits, models and plastic bags of Lego (at $5 for 100 grams, it’s a lot more and cheaper than
Everyone was looking for something important
you’d expect compared to a new set). There was a lot of money being spent and I got an indication of how really popular Lego is and it isn’t just for the kids. And mind you, this all before half-past nine on a Sunday morning. I had to remind myself at this as I passed more people coming in and cars followed me back to my parking spot.
As of writing this, my project is complete and I’m mailing it off next week hopefully making someone happy in the process. So, I discovered Lego is popular and more than I ever realised especially as a collectible for adults and I finally found a use for it rather than using it as an indicator of pain tolerance.

originally published in the BBCN Issue 282 October 2019