Matchbox

When I was a kid, every now and then when I was accompanying mum doing the grocery shopping, she would splurge a dollar and buy me a Matchbox car. I loved playing with my Matchbox cars. My friends and I would drive them around on the floor, make garages out of wooden blocks, do incredible stunts, and generally have an awesome time. One of the best times I remember was at a friend's house when we played on top of an enormous mound of dirt and we carved a winding road from the bottom all the way up to the top. The road was well made in my opinion, and even the tight u-turns were broad enough to drive a semi-trailer around them.

Because I liked Matchbox cars so much, one of my favourite books was Mike and the Modelmakers, which described the Lesney factory in London where Matchbox cars were cast out of a zinc alloy, sprayed with paint, baked to dry them, then assembled with the plastic parts and packaged up to be sent all over the world for kids like me to play with.

When I was about 24, my father was digging around the house to lay some drainpipes down. To his surprise he kept digging up old Matchbox cars that had been smashed into strange shapes. He rang me up to ask me if I knew anything about it, and I had to confess that indeed it was me who had smashed them all, then buried them to hide the evidence. Dead cars tell no tales, or so I thought.

You see, a friend and I had been crashing the cars into each other when it occurred to us that if we hit the cars with a brick it would make them look like real car smashes! Awesome! So we took some cars and snuck around behind the rainwater tank where the grownups never went, got some bricks, and started smashing. The first couple were disasters, we smashed them far too hard and either turned them into pancakes or broke them into tiny fragments. After that we became a bit more nuanced in our destruction and we mastered the caved-in side, the dented fender and the crumpled bonnet. Every weekend we'd scurry off and smash up a few more until most of those cars I'd loved so much were ruined.

My family was, of course, outraged when they found out a couple of decades later what we'd been up to. I think Dad was faintly amused, Mum was cranky because she thought of those cars as hers because she'd paid for them, and my older siblings were enraged because some of those cars had originally been theirs and this was so typical of the sort of stuff that spoiled younger brothers get up to. To attempt to heal the wounds I've been giving my mother a new Matchbox car every birthday and Christmas since my crimes were discovered, but it's really not the same.

These days I have a small collection of Matchbox cars myself, mostly older vintage cars from the 30's through to the 50's since the style is so classic. I also have one or two bizarro-cars, like the one shaped like a toilet, or the replica Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. The Wienermobile used to sit on my desk at work as a conversation starter. When you've moved to a new city and you have a Real Job for the first time and you're trying to make new friends and get to know people, having a tiny hotdog-shaped car on your desk is great! People can't help asking about it. And then you can sing the Oscar Mayer Wiener song for them and everything! I'd never heard the song in person except from an American friend who knew it from his childhood, but that was good enough for me.

It got me into trouble once though, when the local section head (my boss's boss at the time) was chatting to us and for some reason that I can't recall mentioned that he was taking mineral supplements because he had a zinc deficiency. At that moment, all the useful info from Mike and the Modelmakers flashed back into my head so I said to him, "Would you like to suck on my Wienermobile?"

You should have seen the look on his face!