What’s with LEGO?
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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
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| Everyone was looking for something important |
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
originally published in the BBCN Issue 282 October 2019
