The first thing I ever collected in my life was Garbage Pail Kids, aged seven. My foot-long swapsies pile would surely have been my route to instant popularity had it not also been widely known that although my mother was perfectly content to let me gloat over grotesque pictures of fat children in unfortunate circumstances, I was not allowed the accompanying chewing gum lest I swallow it and a gum tree grow out of my ear. This fad was later to be taken over by an inexplicable passion for Letraset and when the weather conditions are right I can still be seen to this day in certain home counties branches of WHSmith, loitering about their dusty rotary display and making provocative gestures.

The last thing I ever collected was idioms, at the behest of someone at university with whom I was absolutely not trying to sleep with in any manner whatsoever. It was a prerequisite of admission to my particular degree that you walk through a specially adapted sheep dip of two parts cheap banana liqueur to one part pretension but he'd swallowed a little more of the curious-smelling yellow liquid than the rest of us and intended to write a genre confounding short story with as many included as possible. Having provided my telephone number purely for the unquestionably innocent purposes of impromptu data collation, I found myself frequently woken up at four in the morning by excited exclamations regarding plus sized women and the finality of their vocal exhortations or the comparative value of wildfowl when found about the person and local shrubbery. Out of mere laziness or perhaps a sudden respect for the English language he never actually wrote the story however but while that particular exercise ended with both our mission objectives sadly unfulfilled, it did leave me with a new favourite idiom.^*

To carry a torch for. Etymology unknown but torch apparently derived from the old French torche or 'twisted thing', which I like. To set something broken alight and sit with it while it burns. Definitions vary too, from the loudly declared and ever-popular unrequited love through to an uneasy pining for something that's long since left the building and every shade of embarrassed red in between. I favour the latter; anyone can stew in unreturned desire and while that might be pleasantly distrcting for an hour or two if you've nothing better to do on a Saturday night if left unchecked that road only leads to bad poetry and looking a bit too speculatively at the customisation options on the Real Dolls website. But a long-term, lingering affection for that which is past suggests at its best an attractive ideal of courtly love and maidens in pointy hats and at its worst, a dignified kind of low-level suffering for those too busy drinking or working or actually sleeping with somebody else to indulge in a full time obsession.

But torches proper are cumbersome things, thick sticks bound with rags soaked in pitch. I've never really mustered the strength needed to pick one up and as such any real romantic idolatry on my part has been necessarily limited. Once, I will admit, I carried a keyring flashlight (from a Christmas cracker) around in my pocket for several weeks before losing it down the back of a sofa in a pub and on occasion I have been known to let a cheap tealight from an IKEA multipack burn for much longer than the recommended two hours until it left a perfect blackened hole on my sheets or brand new bedside table or skin but these incidents are few and far between. That's not to say, of course, that I'm not willing to take my fair share of extravagant, uncomfortable and potentially amusing longing should the opportunity arise but desire is a capricious thing and if even the lightest, most portable torch would find itself suddenly extinguished by the merest flash of Homer Simpson boxer shorts, what chance my poor candles from the pound shop?

^* I also have a favourite present participle verb; despite the subsequent ten years' worth of boil washes I find myself still with an unsightly ring of pomposity around my collar that just wont shift.