When I was a child my family vacationed in London for a few summers, and every time we landed, the first thing I’d ask my father was when he would be able to take us to what I knew then as the hugest toy store to exist: Hamleys!
It was (and still is) seven storeys of glorious chaos. Toys lining the walls from floor to ceiling, an onslaught of cheerful and animated colours and lights. Children running around, with their parents not far behind, between aisles stocked to the brim with eye-catching packaging, under a constant din in which you could barely hear yourself think. It was unlike any place I knew.
The fourth floor was always my first and primary destination because it was where my favourite toys were found: miniature cars. Every year, I couldn’t wait to see what new cars were released that I did not already have in my growing collection. They came in all sorts of shapes and colours, including fluorescents and metallics. Some had moving parts, others had tiny accessories, some even changed colour. Vintage cars, muscle cars, sports cars, monster trucks, and tanks. Boats and planes too, but I didn’t much care for those. I even had a couple of add-on toys: a collapsible garage and a gas station that the cars could dock into for service.
I loved each and every one of my cars, and played with them, often by myself, for hours and took pride in how I kept them in their special briefcase that we had somehow retrofitted for their storage. They were kept in London year long and to this day I’m not quite sure why I never took them back home with me when the summers ended. Didn’t I miss them during the rest of the year? I can’t say. Was I made to leave them behind by my parents? I would think that I’d remember such an unfair command. But I do know this: my family stopped travelling for a while, and when we arrived at our London apartment one summer after a few years’ absence, my cars were nowhere to be found. They were lost, and I was utterly devastated.
But I never forgot about them.
Fast forward 20+ years to when they crossed my mind one day, as they often did, and I decided to Google something along the lines of “tiny toy cars 90s”—because I couldn’t remember what they were called, and I knew they weren’t the Hot Wheels brand that I saw being sold everywhere, my cars were much smaller—and there they were, available to buy through eBay!
I wept. The joy they brought me as a five, six, seven year old child washed over me. I couldn’t believe it. I had found them! Not my cars of course, but ones just like them, previously owned by resellers and toy collectors other children for whom they surely brought the same kind of delight. I immediately purchased a bunch of them, and a few of my favourites now sit in front of me on my desk, and the rest, above my piano.
Note: This is a revised version of a piece originally written in June 2019.