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.

Saturday, January 13, 2024

H is for a Handful of Hangers

Back to Key Rings, a collection in themselves, there must have been thousands over the years of which we've probably seen less than a hundred, and we're about to see one of them again, and not for the second time!

Seven keyrings which will become eight before the end of the post for reasons which escape me, but they are all figural, except the cannon, so they aren't all figural at all!
 
Seen before, and we'll see them again for sure, there are several versions, but it keeps us close to toy soldiers, before we look at some of the more esoteric samples! This one was quite clean, so worth another look, the Highland piper, and a common-enough tourist keepsake.

The cannon, a lovely little thing, all polystyrene, and while the carriage wouldn't stand up to one shot from the likely calibre of that large barrel, if you remove the chain, stick in on the deck of your pirate ship and blast any boarders with a barrelful of ballast gravel and nails, it could still be a game winner!
 
This was why I bid on the lot, I used to have one as a kid, and, indeed, the head is still on my now museum-donateable denim cut-off, but seen here in it's entirety. Mine was stained green with verdigris, after the number of times I was rained-on walking back from the pub or the station, causing the brass rings to corrode and stain the plastic! Like the gun, this one's 'styrene, the rest are PVC rubber, of one type or another.

Almost certainly - without checking - another Xandria, from Holland, and I think it's a non-Disney Cinderella, trying on the shoe, I'll have to find her Prince Charming somewhere!

I took a reminder-shot for some reason, in which (probably 'because') a skier joined the crowd, I think I must have put him to one side then noticed him half-way through the photo-shoot?

Three of them from the rears! The Sesame Street (Sesamstraꞵe) character in yellow is credited on the still extant price-label to EM TV & Marchandising AG, courtesy of Igel Speilzeug GmbH, so German in origin, if not execution, which - like most of these - will be Hong Kong.
 
The skier again, specifically a downhill racer, and the Imp/Elf revealing he doubled up as a pencil-top in some long-lost or forgotten Hong Kong manufactories trade catalogues! More key-rings to come! Always more!

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