Page 18Why do men collect
beer mats, old car
brochures and hole
punches? Answer:
It’s in our male DNA
some bloke presented the experts with an
array of deep-sea diving helmets,
assiduously accumulated over the years.
Meanwhile, as often as not, the collector’s
wife will be beside him, saying she’s been
urging him to get rid of his collection for
as long as she can remember.
Certainly, the women in my own life have
been seeking to crush my collector’s
instinct since my earliest childhood.
As a boy in the early Sixties, I used to
collect brochures from car companies,
advertising their latest models. It started
on a day out at the Motor Show, when it
used to be held at Earls Court in London.
I went from stand to stand, picking up
brochures, marvelling that so much fasci-
nating literature was handed out for free.
Soon I was sending off for details every
time a new model came out — and before
I knew it, every square inch of the floor in
my bedroom was covered in piles of
brochures, waist high.
I still remember, with a pang of
uncomprehending grief, the day my
mother declared that enough was enough,
and took the whole lot to the local tip.
Mrs U is no better. It was she who made
me get rid of my entire collection of video
cassettes, for no better reason that we no
longer had any means of playing them
after we’d swapped our VCR machine for
a DVD player.Declutter
Meanwhile, I still lament the day she
announced that we no longer had room
for the massive filing cabinet that used to
live in the small spare bedroom before she
had it converted into a shower room.
I could keep only essential documents,
she decreed, which meant I had to chuck
out thousands of treasures, including the
instructions and warranties for every long-
discarded toaster, record-player, Goblin
Teasmade, Sony Walkman, Sinclair
calculator, Rubik’s Cube, Nintendo Pac-
Man, Game Boy, Xbox, clock radio, hair-
dryer and lawnmower we’d ever owned.
What a devastating loss to history!
No, it’s surely an incontrovertible truth
that the tendency of men to collect, and
women to declutter, is one of the many
fundamental differences between the
sexes that modern equality campaigners
simply refuse to acknowledge. TheL
ADIES and gentlemen of
the jury, I ask you: can you
imagine any woman of your
acquaintance amassing a
collection of 204 devices for
punching holes in paper or leather,
for no other purpose than the
pleasure of owning them?
All right, one or two hands may have
gone up, but if so, these are the exceptions
that prove the rule.
I put it to you that the urge to accumulate
large numbers of useless objects with no
obvious aesthetic appeal (well, useless if
you don’t plan to use them) is a
distinctively masculine trait, while the
impulse to declutter and get rid of them is
distinctively feminine.
If my theory is right, then this week’s
harrowing story of Peter Duffell and his
magnificent hole punch collection perfectly
illustrates the truth behind these gender
stereotypes, as we must now call them.
Mr Duffell is the 82-year-old retired
teacher who has spent more than 40 years
lovingly amassing the 204 unlovely
contraptions mentioned above — some of
them still in their boxes, never opened. As
he explains: ‘They cover the whole history
of punches, from the Victorian era to the
1960s, and are probably museum quality.’Ultimatum
In his quest to expand his collection, he
has encountered and surmounted
formidable obstacles. On one occasion, he
was stopped in Germany by customs
officers who suspected the punches he
was carrying contained illegal drugs.
On another, his wife Gill put her foot
down and compelled him to remove his
collection from the living room hearth,
where it was proudly displayed, forcing
him to banish it to the garden shed.
But Mr Duffell pressed on undaunted,
snapping up prize examples of hole
punches from as far afield as Japan,
Czechoslovakia and the U.S. Until now.
Tragically for him, the 78-year-old Mrs
Duffell has laid down an ultimatum. With
the couple downsizing to a flat from their
family house in Lichfield, Staffordshire,
she says he must either flog his collection
— or she’ll bin it.
The long and the short of it is that Mr
Duffell’s collection comes up for sale at
Richard Winterton Auctioneers in Lichfield
on September 4, where it is valued at a
less-than-princely £200 for the whole lot
— an average of 98p for each specimen. So
bang go his never-convincing protests that
his collection was a shrewd investment,
which would reap rich rewards over time.
But you don’t have to study the Duffells
for evidence that men tend to collect stuff,
women to throw stuff away.
Watch any edition of Antiques Roadshow,
and you’ll see that nine times out of ten
it’s a man who brings along a treasured
collection of matchboxes, railway posters,
beer mats, coins, manhole covers, tin
soldiers, Brooke Bond tea cards or rusting
garden implements.
On one occasion, I seem to remember,question is how and why this difference
exists. I can understand why women, bio-
logically equipped as they are for suckling
babies, emerged as the principal child-
rearers. In the same way, I can see why
men, with our early history as hunters,
tend to be more competitive and violent
than the gentler, though deadlier sex.
But what in our dim, distant past
accounts for the masculine instinct to
collect hole punches, beer mats or bro-
chures for the Ford Zephyr 6, Mk III, which
rolled off the production line in 1962?
A (female) colleague suggests we male
hoarders are driven by the same impulse
that prompts peacocks to fan their tail-
feathers at pea-hens. But can this be true?
Did some primeval trigger in Mr Duffell’s
genes make him think the best way to
impress a mate was to amass a collection
of hole punches, ancient and modern?Instincts
I find that hard to believe. But then it’s
equally hard to believe the right-on theory
that differences between the sexes can be
accounted for mainly by social
conditioning, spread by such means as
subliminal advertising.
Whatever the truth, this appears to be
the thinking behind the preposterous ban
on adverts deemed by the Advertising
Standards Authority (ASA) to reinforce
stereotypes of women as child-rearers and
men as adventurous go-getters.
Indeed, I felt that in her otherwise
thoroughly sensible Mail article yesterday,
the novelist Fay Weldon let the humour-
less nincompoops at the ASA escape
lightly when she suggested it was fear of a
Twitterstorm that made them ban light-
hearted ads for Volkswagen and
Philadelphia cheese. In the case of the
Volkswagen ad, after all, only three people
had written to object.
No, the fact is that the advertising regula-
tors are in the vanguard of the campaign
to promote political correctness at the
expense of every vestige of common sense.
You can’t get a job in a quango, a university
or a regulatory body these days unless you
subscribe to every fashionable, half-baked,
Left-wing doctrine about equality.
I would suggest the main reason for the
abject failure of Socialism, wherever it has
been tried, is that it takes no account of
the animal side of mankind’s nature. By
this, I mean the instincts that make us
compete, love family above strangers and
strive for the welfare of our near and dear
above the abstract common good.
Properly harnessed, those instincts can
serve everyone in society. Instead, the Left
tries to legislate them out of existence.
What possible good can be served by
pretending there are no differences
between the sexes?
Which reminds me: in the spirit of the
age, a study this week claims that,
contrary to widely held belief, men are as
capable of multi-tasking as women.
Well, of course we are. It’s just that we
have more important things to do — such
as focusing our energies on the single,
vital task of expanding our collections of
hole punches.TOM UTLEY
COMMENT
How could any Tory
cosy up to Corbyn?
WHAT on earth can have possessed them?
Three Tory MPs have agreed to meet
Jeremy Corbyn to discuss toppling their
own Government and installing the Marxist
class warrior as caretaker Prime Minister.
The actions of Dominic Grieve, Oliver
Letwin and Caroline Spelman are
contemptible on so many levels it’s hard to
know where to start. Less than a month
ago, Boris Johnson was elected
Conservative leader by an overwhelming
majority of members and MPs, on a pledge
to leave the EU by October 31.
Yet instead of accepting that democratic
result and helping Mr Johnson in his stated
aim of securing a new Brexit deal, these
rebels already plot his downfall.
A fourth Tory MP, Guto Bebb, has now
joined the camp, arguing that putting Mr
Corbyn into No10 would be less damaging
than a No Deal Brexit. Really? Has he read
the Labour manifesto?
These malcontents have had a complete
loyalty bypass. They will stop at nothing to
overturn the referendum result.
So why, with such disdain for their party,
are they still sitting on the Tory benches?
The honourable thing would be to resign
their seats and fight a by-election. Sadly,
honour is not their strong suit.
The Tories have a wafer-thin Commons
majority and need all their MPs pulling
together to get Brexit done. By their
treachery, the rebels bring the hideous
prospect of a Marxist-led government
starkly into view.
And ironically, with the clock ticking
towards a Halloween Brexit, these kamikaze
tactics make the likelihood of No Deal – the
thing they fear most – stronger by the day.
Degrees of risk
THERE is much to celebrate in this year’s
A-level results – a record proportion of
girls succeeding in sciences, grade
inflation slowing.
But as students move into higher
education, there are troubling signs that
universities are more interested in cramming
them in to keep up revenues than genuinely
matching them with the right courses.
Applicants are bribed with cash, laptops
and tablets and are increasingly being given
unconditional offers if they sign on the
dotted line. This may work for some but
high drop-out levels suggest that far too
many students find they can’t cope.
In their scramble to fill rolls, universities
must be careful not to lure in young people
who are simply not up to the work.
Encouraging them to incur mountainous
debts with little chance of a decent
qualification at the end of it is profoundly
irresponsible – and desperately cruel.
A national emergency
HOME Secretary Priti Patel’s eye-catching
initiative to print knife crime warnings on
fried chicken boxes at takeaways around
the country is a recognition that fatal
stabbings happen all too often in the
vicinity of these fast-food outlets.
It’s also an acknowledgement that
perpetrators AND victims come
disproportionately from black and minority
ethnic communities. That is not a racist
slur. It’s a fact.
How depressing then that Labour’s Diane
Abbott immediately denounced Miss Patel’s
move as ‘offensive’. It was the same when
Boris Johnson announced an expansion of
police stop-and-search powers. Miss Abbott
railed about how community relations
would be plunged into the deep-freeze.
Doesn’t she realise how frightened parents
in these communities are for their children’s
safety? They aren’t against tougher action
- they long for it.
Knife crime is a national emergency – with
two more dead and a third critically
wounded in the last 48 hours. Closing our
eyes to the facts will only make it worse.
And many more will die.
(^) Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019