Hobbies

 First published in Column 8 on the 12.12.90

 When the Hillary Commission enthuses about getting up to Play Kiwi Sports I tend to remain in my seat. Sedentary occupations are more my style.

That’s not to say I’m lacking in energy. Several times I’ve taken up hobbies with a passion that swept aside everything in its path.

However, two things are a problem when it comes to me and hobbies: firstly my enthusiasm runs out. And secondly, usually faster, my money runs out.

I go like a bull at a gate into whatever hobby has taken my fancy, and for several weeks everything else gets low priority.

Food, I despise it. Fresh air, I haven’t got time for it. Company, who needs it?

And then I wake up one morning, and something seems to have gone out of life. The new day might be as bright as the last, but suddenly my hobby holds no joy for me.

Try as I might, all the weeks of super-charged energy dissipate. And the leftovers of my hobby litter the cupboards of my house.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my money supply has run out about the same time.

My wife has a similar problem: ‘What shall I take up this year?’ she asks.

Since she’s a very practical person, and likes nothing better than using her hands to good effect, I suggest a variety of things I know will interest her.

Then she always ask the same question: ‘And where will I get the money?’

I had a stamp collecting binge once.

I dug out the elderly stamp album I’d acquired as a child expecting to find some rare and exceptionally valuable stamp had been sitting around waiting to be discovered. Instead I had to wade through page after page of Mao Tse-Tung and his revolutionaries almost obliterated by overprinting.

I’d loom and drool over expensive displays of stamps – then come home with the only one I could afford: a few cents worth of Ross Dependency.

Then there was my genealogy bit.

I filled pages of school note books with relatives’ names. I made an immense chart of ancestors courtesy of my mother’s memory, and foolishly let my daughter take it to school one day when they were doing family trees.

She left it on someone’s desk.

I searched back as far as I could without spending any cash, then came to the realisation that every birth certificate I’d need was going to cost me a fortune; all the relatives I wanted to trace had inconveniently died on the other side of the world.

A workmate proudly showed me his efforts in this direction. He had an album full of birth and death and marriage certificates and even some touched-up photos.

Over afternoon tea he told me how much he’d spent to gain a little bit of information. I don’t remember choking on my coffee but I think I might have dropped the remainder of my gingernut in it.

Unfortunately, the next generation already costs too much without spending any more on those dead and buried.

There must be some hobby I can afford.

I could collect pencils with trademarks on – I just can’t see the point.

 

USSR stamp notebook used by children in school to collect stamps
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Later, I did make some money out of stamp collecting by gradually selling off the newer items I’d bought at a bit of a profit.

And once the Internet came along, keeping a family tree was a much easier task than writing out large charts. With the help of a couple of cousins I managed to get a largish family tree online and this had elicited a number of enquiries over the years – not that I’ve often been able to help, but it’s usually brought some other information to light.