Eleven years ago I attended the Wagga Wagga Model Railway Exhibition. It seems like yesterday. I wonder if people are building model railway exhibition layouts now during the Covid-19 pandemic in the hope that exhibitions will return next year. This prompted me to check out other model railway exhibition programs from the past in my collection. It would be good to reminisce about all those exhibition layouts from the past and go through my archive of exhibition photos.
There were supposed to be three boxes of exhibition programs in my collection and a portable hard drive with all my photos. I knew I had been to plenty of exhibitions both prior to and after that 2009 exhibition in Wagga Wagga.
But as fate would have it, I couldn't find the portable hard drive or any of those exhibition programs. The portable hard drive was somewhere in the house but where were the boxes of programs? Then I remembered having a Marie Kondo moment about six months ago when I decided to tidy up my study. This meant throwing out a lot of "ancient" material, using the well worn rationalisation that I hadn't looked at any of this stuff for ages so there was no point in keeping it.
I don't have to tell you what an absolute mistake that was!
As we all know when it comes to hardware items (for example, scraps of wood, strips of metalwork, random nails and screws of unknown size and origin), we NEVER throw that stuff away because we know some day it will be absolutely essential. Of course, we joke around with mates about this phenomenon because it's part of who we are, or in this case, being a railway modeller. We laugh with self-conscious identification when comedian Michael McIntyre relates his man-drawer experience because it is all so true. And when our wives, partners or girlfriends shake their heads in complete ignorance of our strategies, we shake our heads too because they simply do not understand.
And so it is true that my boxes of model railway exhibition programs from the past 30 years (and maybe longer) had been taken out of my study, by me, and dumped unceremoniously into the recycling bin for roadside collection. And while I had no need to refer to them for the past six months, nay the past 30 years (or maybe longer), it is of no small comfort to know that now I needed to refer to those programs like never before!
The only thing worse about having thrown out something you now need is when you know you have the item you need but you cannot find it....
