So last time I visited my mum, she handed me two boxes of my crap that had been cluttering her house up for the last 14 years. The first one of which is full of Subbuteo stuff. For the unitiated, Subbuteo was a table football game, where you flicked little blokes at a ball, and tried to score before your younger brother sat on the fragile little blokes and broke them all –
Here’s a Subbuteo man –
and here’s what geeks like teenage-stevie looked like playing it –
So what to do with all this stuff? I clearly don’t want it. A few of the teams seem to be fetching a couple of quid on Ebay, but I’m not even sure I can be bothered to list them. I might just take them over to my local charity shop. The boxes for each team aren’t in good enough nick for collectors, and the occasional team appears to be meeting government requirements regarding equal opportunities, by having at least one player who’s been broken off at the legs and stuck back on with whatever sticky stuff came to hand (a plaster is the most fitting I’ve found so far!)
Back in the day, I was a full on Subbuteo nut – my brother and I had grandstands, floodlights, and other weirdness, and the range of teams I’ve got here goes from obvious ones like Wimbledon and Man U through to Vancouver Whitecaps and a team of subbuteo blokes in yellow tracksuits, presumably for warming up!! Did my geekery know no bounds??
Aha! And I’ve just found my pride and joy – a ‘wide arms’ goalie – normal goalies were long and thin, and you could get squat looking goalies in the interchangable goalie sets. But wide arms goalie was like the Subbuteo version of Pat Jennings – an inch-high force to be reckoned with, who somehow avoided being sat on, so remains intact to this day.
If any of you know any subbuteo geeks who’d like all this stuff, do let me know. I’m not planning on keeping it for long (unless anyone fancies coming round for a game… doh! I’ve not got the pitch anymore, unless it’s the other box of clutter from mum…!)
Soundtrack – Tommy Sims, ‘Peace And Love’.