Holy upsetting, Batman

Oh it was a bad idea, it surely was.

Lunchtimes can be boring things in an office if you don't want to go out and risk being tempted into parting with money.

Read the paper. Get bored; pick up your book and decide a couple of pages in that you're not in the mood. Have a couple of games of solitaire/free cell, whatever on the computer.

Then, inevitably, you start web surfing.

Generally this is fine, but now and again, it all goes horribly wrong. Today, for example, I'd had a chat with a colleague and as these things do, we got off subject and somehow ended up talking about toys we'd had as kids.

So anyway, this nostalgia trip kicked me off on a search of e-bay not, I hasten to add, with the view to purchasing, but just to look. Either way it was and would have been a mistake.

I used to have - before half you lot were born - a Corgi Toys Batmobile based on the 1966 TV series. It was great. But one day in an uncharacteristic bout of vandalism it had an accident involving a can of lighter fluid, a match, and sometime later, a hammer.

I don't know why I mangled it thus, I generally took care of my toys to the extent that when I outgrew them, there were heaps of the things to pass on to cousins and so forth.

But not the Batmobile. And I've always vaguely regretted that act of destruction.

Anyway, this brings me back to e-bay. Now there's a whole bunch of them out there in various states of disrepair in the £20 - £30 price range. There's another price range - somewhat higher, for better preserved examples.

But the killer was the original, unscratched, still-in-its-unopened-box mint 1966 Corgi Batmobile. The same model I had before I mangled it.

£199 opening bid.

Even my old one, sans box but in pre-mangled state would have been worth about £40. It cost me Ma and Pa something like the princely sum of 5/6d (that's 27½p in modern money).

It is to weep.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

Holy upsetting, Batman

Oh it was a bad idea, it surely was.

Lunchtimes can be boring things in an office if you don't want to go out and risk being tempted into parting with money.

Read the paper. Get bored; pick up your book and decide a couple of pages in that you're not in the mood. Have a couple of games of solitaire/free cell, whatever on the computer.

Then, inevitably, you start web surfing.

Generally this is fine, but now and again, it all goes horribly wrong. Today, for example, I'd had a chat with a colleague and as these things do, we got off subject and somehow ended up talking about toys we'd had as kids.

So anyway, this nostalgia trip kicked me off on a search of e-bay not, I hasten to add, with the view to purchasing, but just to look. Either way it was and would have been a mistake.

I used to have - before half you lot were born - a Corgi Toys Batmobile based on the 1966 TV series. It was great. But one day in an uncharacteristic bout of vandalism it had an accident involving a can of lighter fluid, a match, and sometime later, a hammer.

I don't know why I mangled it thus, I generally took care of my toys to the extent that when I outgrew them, there were heaps of the things to pass on to cousins and so forth.

But not the Batmobile. And I've always vaguely regretted that act of destruction.

Anyway, this brings me back to e-bay. Now there's a whole bunch of them out there in various states of disrepair in the £20 - £30 price range. There's another price range - somewhat higher, for better preserved examples.

But the killer was the original, unscratched, still-in-its-unopened-box mint 1966 Corgi Batmobile. The same model I had before I mangled it.

£199 opening bid.

Even my old one, sans box but in pre-mangled state would have been worth about £40. It cost me Ma and Pa something like the princely sum of 5/6d (that's 27½p in modern money).

It is to weep.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.