THE HIPPY AND THE RIOT SHIELDS
Thoughts on Luck
£3 a week meant strict decisions on how my pocket money was spent. ‘It’s your money.’ My dad would say, but it was a loaded statement. Sometimes he really wanted me to use it in a way he perceived as wise, others, subtle dissuasion was applied to my latest hippy run at the wall of riot shields. Either way, his sentiments always came with the reminder that the call was mine.
I’d had my share of luck. A £10 note on the floor in a pay phone booth. My mum won at the bingo and came home with a PlayStation game for my brother and I. Perhaps most importantly of all, I sat there in my best shirt for the local newspaper reporter with his camera, holding up my winning entry in the McDonalds children’s colouring competition.
A big one came my way. Big in terms of the impact on my relationship with chance. I was collecting Pogs; these little round cardboard discs with cartoon characters printed on them that you slammed with a thick plastic disc. If you flipped your opponents over, you kept it. My heart had been sliced by more Southampton shiny cards and stickers than any football fan should ever have to suffer, their own included, so I knew the pain involved with blindly buying fresh packs of any collectible. The odds didn’t favour me. But as we approached Toymaster, across the damp car park, under light drizzle, sometime in the mid 1990s, my tail was up. Like any determined gambler, I smelled it in the air.
“Well, it’s up to you, love, but when it’s gone, it’s gone. Wouldn’t it be better to wait and trade for the ones you need?” Dad reasoned. I needed 5 to complete the Pogs set. 3 of them rare, 2 pretty tricky to get. He was right. That was the smartest route if you went with logic. But I preferred magic to science. The possibility. We walked the various sections, weaving between other kids negotiating with their parents as the little perimeter train ran around the shelf above. Wrestling figures, Terminator bikes, the harder stuff that came with their own paints. I wanted to look like I’d taken his advice on board by browsing, but I knew what I wanted. They kept Pogs in little foil packets on the counter, so before any interventions were made, I waited until nobody was being served, splintered off, grabbed a pack, tossed them down and thrust the money into the lady’s hand before she’d even scanned the barcode. Dad kept grumbling as I began ripping into them whilst he held the door open. The first out the pack was a Southampton shiny. Or whatever the Pog equivalent had been. Then it was mayhem. Two of the rarest and a pretty-tricky to find one fell into my hand. 3 of the required 5. It was unthinkable. “That was a one off.” He told me as we walked home, my old man and a joke-shop set of teeth on a neck. That’s how big the grin was.