Column: The secret confessions of an adult Legoholic

By Thomas Winterhoff
First published in the Oak Bay News on February 19, 2003
Copyright © Thomas Winterhoff

"Hello. My name is Thomas… and I’m a Legoholic."

It's a problem I can't bring myself to talk about very often, since I'm now in recovery, but a benign-sounding incident that occurred in the newsroom last month brought one of my most serious personal dilemmas to the forefront yet again.

When a colleague passed along a small Lego set that had been given to him as a stocking stuffer at Christmas, I could feel my pulse start to race with excitement and anticipation. And I had been doing so well up to now...

As with many other kids growing up in the 1960s, there was no better gift to be found under the Christmas tree than Lego. In my youth, after plenty of badgering and whining in the months leading up to Dec. 25 every year, I ended up amassing one of the better collections in the neighbourhood.

In those days, of course, what tumbled out of the packages was significantly different from what's available today. All I remember from those early years are some very basic 2x2 and 2x4 red and white bricks, with a marginally bigger and highly prized building platform also surfacing occasionally. The very unconvincing roof tile pieces were none-the-less very coveted items within my limited social circle, as were the primitive doors and windows. But that was about it.

Nowadays, however, things have changed dramatically. In the last 10 or 15 years, the company's product line has expanded exponentially. Themed sets (pirates, knights, rescue teams, ocean divers, hard rock miners) are now the norm, plus tie-ins to all the Star Wars and Harry Potter movies.

Each of these more elaborate sets contains several hundred specially manufactured pieces, with nary a red roof tile to be seen. There are now even motorized and computerized sets on the shelves to keep even the brainiest of rugrats busy for hours.

Somewhere between my 10th birthday and the day I left home at the age of seventeen, my entire Lego collection disappeared — never to be seen again. For an extended period of time, the wonders of this most wondrous of toys remained nothing but dim memories. But that state of affairs changed dramatically about six years ago.

My dizzying descent into a rejuvenated Lego addiction began with the happy arrival of my nephew Nigel. With no kids of our own (at least not yet), my wife and I have spent many happy hours crawling around on the floor entertaining him and the other young offspring of friends and relatives who have already reproduced themselves.

To my mind, at any rate, one of the prerequisites for taking on the roles of loving uncle and doting aunt logically included the creation of a well-stocked toy box to help keep the wee ones busy whenever they came over to visit. Amongst the myriad colouring books, jigsaw puzzles, Hot Wheels cars and classics of children’s literature, there were also an obligatory handful of Lego sets.

The purchases were fairly small in the beginning, concentrating on a few basic sets that I thought children might enjoy. But my long-lost and now rejuvenated love for an enduring classic (and the highly satisfying precision of all those tiny, brightly coloured components) prompted me to buy increasingly complex sets. With them, I planned out and constructed elaborate dioramas of urban and rural vistas and recreated various scenes from history and children’s literature to engage the minds and imaginations of Nigel and the rest of the kids.

The result, of course, was that I began to accumulate much more Lego than anyone would consider healthy for a 41-year-old man to have. To my wife's growing horror, I was soon forced to buy several large plastic tubs and fishing tackle boxes just to hold and organize the hundreds of pieces.

But it's not like I was the only one suffering from this affliction. There are dozens of websites devoted to the art of building with Lego (...um... so I understand). There is even one site (...er... apparently) that consists of an exhaustive, fully illustrated catalogue of every single set and every type of piece ever produced by the company, right down to the rarest and tiniest components.

As ashamed as I am to admit it now, I occasionally smuggled new purchases into the house under the cover of darkness — only to be opened later when my wife was busy outdoors installing a new muffler on the Firefly or safely up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters.

It was exactly the sort of behaviour that makes clinical psychologists rub their hands with glee and that would normally prompt friends of such an addictive personality to immediately convene an "intervention" on his or her behalf.

All along, of course, I would tell my wife that the collection was "for the kids". The only problem with that feeble excuse was that, whenever they would come over to play, I would slyly spirit away all the "good" Lego and only bring out the 1960s-style pieces for them to play with.

I am not proud of my actions, brothers and sisters. I know that my wife and I would probably be living in a mansion on Beach Drive by now if I had only been able to curtail my penchant for buying Lego. But I do take heart in the fact that I have been "clean" for two years now — apart from the most recent lapse triggered by the generosity of my newsroom colleague.

One of these days, I'll become a stronger and more giving person, so that I'll feel comfortable letting my nephew play with all of the pieces in my collection. Maybe when he's in his 40s... and mature like me.