About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Q is for Question Time - Famine?

It's been a while since we had a Question Time, and this is an odd one, but I feel it should be more obvious an answer than I have so far uncovered, or failed to, so can anyone help ID this figure?

About sixty or seventy millimetres, but of a child so 100-mil plus in scale. He is clearly holding a bowl, but is it an empty food-bowl, or a begging bowl, and is he in an aid-queue or looking/waiting for non-existent food?

Polystyrene and with no signs of glue or other fixing on the underside of the base, I feel he must be some kind of famine-relief fund-raiser, or token of such, but who issued him, the UN, War on Want, Oxfam . . . There are so many NGO's trying to save the millions of souls failed by capitalism and dictators (there is enough food, land and money on this planet for all eight-million to enjoy a decent standard of living), it could be any of them.

And when, 1970's, 1980's or earlier? If this rings a bell with anyone, I'd love to know more about it. He seems to be more Asian than African or generic, and the lack of gunk on the base-underside, suggests he wasn't attached to a donation receptacle/collection-box, but issued as a figurine? Was he part of a set, maybe a family group?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oliver Twist "More Please"?

Hugh Walter said...

Ooh! Aren't you a star! Yes! That's a distinct possibility, which would pull Cavendish into the frame, I know they had a resin Dickens set, they may well have had an earlier plastic one, I don't think so, it's not their style particularly, but that's a very good suggestion . . . thanks Anon!

H