JUNKYARD INDIANA JONES AND THE RAIDER OF THE LOST SKIPS
Junkyard Indiana
You'd turn up at his rundown place hidden amongst the ex-anarchist community of Whiteway and find a couple of pianos dating back to Beethoven's time, a variety of rusty 1950s jukeboxes and all sorts of other historical paraphernalia from centuries past. It was as if Indiana Jones had been in a rush from his adventures abroad and not had time to think what exactly it was he was bringing back with him. There was a chance Mark might have brought back the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail but you'd have to find it amongst all the other hoards of disparate artefacts he'd smuggled back to his Cotswold compound.
When I recall our visits to Mark's place as a teenager I think of the idyllic guerilla capitalist scene up there as like a cross between 'The Antiques Roadshow' and Paul Theroux's 'The Mosquito Coast' where one might imagine that if Western Civilisation collapsed completely you'd soon be able to reconstruct it all from the treasure found in Mark's backyard.
But perhaps the crowning glory of all the objects he'd pillaged was a 25ft glass fibre Buddha that sat serenely overlooking his pond; to our provincial minds, it felt as significant a spiritual moment for the West as the Manichean painting of Jesus dating from the 12th Century was for the East.
And in a defining moment of grand inspiration, Mark even decided one hot summer's day to assemble a posse of able-bodied men to haul the Buddha statue to the top of Swift's Hill in order to watch a Euro semi-final between England and Portugal later that evening on a portable television that sat in the palm of Guatama's hand.
For all my Indiana Jones comparisons, I can't imagine the archeologist adventurer doing that.
But even before Mark, there was a older, some might say more nefarious collector of objects and his name was Ron otherwise known as the raider of the lost skips.
Raider Of The Lost Skips
Ron, or one-eyed Ron as he was known to some had a glass right eye that was constantly weeping; he was a consistent frequenter of the local cafes and watering holes and wouldn't have looked out of place in the Cantina scene in 'Star Wars' or in the back of a Sydney Greenstreet Moroccan-style qahwas from one of those old black and white 1940s movies.
A keen lover of cricket and, according to local legend, a decent player for the Bisley team back many moons ago when he was a youth, Ron when I knew him seemed more like a cross between a rustic Del Boy and a Saloon gangster. Always wearing a fedora, occasionally a Western Cowboy style bush hat Ron scrubbed up remarkably well and if it hadn't been for his old Gloucestershire drawl might have passed as a more respectable figure amongst the gentry.
But perhaps it wasn't just Ron's accent that gave some pause for thought in his company but the frequent rumours of his less-than-ethical methods of sourcing building supplies to local crews around the area and naive city folk looking to cut the costs of their new build house projects.
Say you wanted some Cotswold stone or Welsh roof slate, Ron would call you late at night with the exact place you might find it giving strict instructions of what time (early dawn/after sundown) to pick it up and exactly where one should park to collect the stuff discreetly as if it was a bank heist he was assisting you with and not your 'innocent' request for cut-rate materials for your house. Unlike Mark, Ron might not have been able to find you a Holy Grail or Ark of the Covenant but he might tell you where all the asbestos had been dumped in the area and save your life as a consequence.
A lover of the ladies, you always knew when Ron was in an amorous mood as he would place a stolen rose in his shirt pocket and wash his hair for the first time in months. In many ways, he resembled Falstaff in his courtship of Mistress Ford in that classic scene in Verdi's opera, all horny and dandy and he'd even take to reciting the odd romantic verse. If only that damn glass eye would have stopped weeping he might have won more hearts to increase his batting average in later years.
Mark and Ron seemed like larger-than-life movie characters when I was younger and in some ways even larger than the fictional comparisons I've struggled to draw upon.
For between the two of them, I believe they had enough character to put both Indiana Jones and Del Boy permanently out of business.
We just do mad collectors better around these parts, I think.