Did you hear about the Bower Bird, that lives somewhere on the other side of the world? The male collects brightly coloured stones and flowers to decorate the approach to its nest, hoping to attract a mate. No doubt the female bird comes along and says, “Orchids again? I’m sick of orchids. Can’t you come up with anything new for me?”

Human beings have, of course, taken collecting to a new level. How has it become such a big part of our civilisation? It starts at an early age — almost every child has a collection of some type and many parents encourage it. A long time ago when I was growing up on the other side of the world I had the usual collections of stamps and coins. I even stood by the railway tracks “train-spotting” – writing down the numbers of the trains that passed and getting very excited when a superior train with a name swept  by.

But my favourite collecting mania, even though it lasted only a few months, was bus tickets.  Whenever we travelled by bus we were avidly seeking tickets that had special numbers. Palindromes which read the same backwards, and, even more desirable, tickets with one number repeated however many times the ticket had digits. I remember once that, on the way to school, my ticket number was 5550. I waited on the bus for the next 5 tickets to be sold so I could beg the purchaser for it. I missed my school stop and was an hour late that day, but it was worth it, because I sold it to a rich collector and was able to buy a big bag of sweets.

Collections by adults can be less harmless. Remember the Nazi camp guard who made lampshades out of the skin of victims? I had a friend in the old days who had two collections. One was a semi-secret one. He collected women — as many as he could get and he was both rich and persuasive so he got a lot, and kept three or four going at the same time. His other, more public collection was of old religious statues. Whenever he was tired from hunting women, he hunted these in antique shops all over the country, and then displayed them in a chapel which he had built in his house, I once asked him “How can you collect all these religious things when everyone knows you are womanizing all over the place? Isn’t that just hypocrisy?”  “You foreigners don’t understand”, he replied, “My religious collection is my way of doing penance for my bad behaviour. I am weak and can’t stop it but I have to find a way of compensating for it”. And sure enough in his simple chapel he managed to look very much like a monk.

I can’t help wondering about you ladies whose best friends are diamonds. Are your jewellery collections penances? Or are they sins which demand some other sort of penances?

Do I still collect? No. Nothing except old stories.

Isn’t it an odd world that we live in?