What?s the use of roots if you can?t spread them?

What’s the use of roots if you can’t spread them?

'What’s the use of roots if you can’t spread them, what’s the use of wings if you can’t fly?' to quote Brian Bedford's soulful lyric more fully (titles are limited in length, it seems.)

A Silly Sunday topic, in my book: possibly highly offensive to some of my readers, so I’m not going to say what article in which magazine inspired me to write. I’ll just say that as a fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I know a Magrathean tendency when I stumble upon one.

Magrathea, non-fans need to know, is a planet that gained immense wealth constructing bespoke luxury planets for the mega-rich: Jeff Bezos has probably already placed his order for somewhere where the sunsets are precisely the right shade of green. We’re talking about the collecting of cameras, and the likelihood that a collector won’t take things out of the display cabinet to soil them with a roll of film.

These are the same people, I suspect, as have several supercars in an air-conditioned garage in Monaco, and fly by personal jet to every grand prix. One Casio digital is not enough: nor is the latest Apple watch, or even my 1957 Omega Seahorse (which, like my Alpha 7, is pretty slender and light). For them, it must be big, heavy, waterproof to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and preferably encrusted with diamonds, rather than just keeping decent time.

I told Mrs D that I was going to write about this, and she said that I have a load of stuff I don’t use… There may be some justice in that: I haven’t used the second Contax RTS I bought (LCE, Southampton, 1980) for years, but I keep it in case the others cease to function. It’s semi-functional: the autoexposure system doesn’t work, though the meter is accurate, and the electronic shutter is fine (or was, last time I checked). It’s the sole manual-only RTS in the world!

I have had it in mind to write a blog about genuinely useless things that I own (there are a few), and I’ll save that for another Sunday, soon. Today, it’s all about things that are too expensive to risk using and wearing… A recent comment in my favourite weekly photo magazine suggested that a camera isn’t a proper Leica until it’s ‘brassed’ – a little bit of metal showing through the black paint. Mine passes the test!
And… some of the superstar trappings are a little bit beyond me. I don’t like a watch that’s too big and heavy, for instance (the same goes for cameras: your EOS-1 D is safe from me!), but I am not at all sure that I could own a truly fast car without booking myself and it onto a track day to see just how fast it will go. Having it polished once a month simply wouldn’t hack it.

I like value, and I like things that are simply what they are, unashamed and uncompetitive. (I was really rather sad when a painting I’d bought for £17 proved to be worth several times that when the artist came back into fashion!) It’s a very provincial attitude, but then, I’m provincial: born here, live here. And even a gold Hasselblad with blue leather would have to have a film put through it…