You will never believe what this man collects

These are some of the things that my son has deemed worthy of collecting over the last few years: bottle tops, stones, Japanese lemonade bottles, Justice league characters, Pokemon cards, foreign currency coins and the tiny toys from the inside of Kinder Surprises.

I get where he is coming from.  As a little girl I collected writing paper, erasers, stickers and swaps. I tried desperately to collect marbles but I was very bad at playing them so my collection was always very limited.

I thought it was quite cute that my son had inherited my childhood penchant for collecting nonsense until I had a bookshelf full of bottles, stones, wrestling figurines and Simpson’s characters and then I realised it was just a lot of dusting. On the plus side we have a lot of books because he believes that every novel written by the same author is part of a series and therefore worth collecting. So that’s good. I think.

At the moment he is collecting the Harry Potter cards and paraphernalia that come with the Daily Telegraph every morning.   You buy the Daily Telegraph (nagging children do wonders for the sales figures) and in exchange for the little coupon on page 2 you get Harry Potter cards, wands or posters that you just have to have if you are 10 and want to have any street cred. And if you are an earnest  collector like my son you really need to make sure that you don’t miss a day of the series, even if it means that your mother has to go to 9 different newsagents clutching at a tattered and torn coupon while you smile beseechingly at the shopkeeper.

But I daresay that it is easier for me to help my son amass this Harry Potter collection than it would be, for instance, for the mother of Sigurdur Hjartarson who has a collection of penises.

Yes he does.

Hjartarson’s Icelandic Phallological Museum houses the world’s largest collection of penises and penile parts after Sigurdur set himself a goal of owning the private parts of every one of the species of male mammals living in Iceland. He currently has 276 penile pieces including the penis of a walrus which is his newest addition.  And yes, in case you are wondering he does have a human penis in his collection. The penis of a renowned womanizer named Pall Arason who agreed to have his penis donated to the museum before he died at the age of 95 after claiming to have bedded 296 women.

Okay, so I’m hoping Ethan never decides to collect penises. I think it would bring a whole new level to cleaning his room that I don’t think either of us are ready for….

Are you a collector? Did you collect things as a child?