What are the coolest gadgets you own?

A few years ago whilst on one of our many runs in the car, we came upon a small novelty shop in some quaint village. I say novelty shop it was actually the villages main shop but it also stocked novelties for the tourist. I had never thought of collection anything, and indeed I hadn’t on the day we visited the village. We had stopped for some lunch, and decided to have a walk about being that it was on of the few nice days we had had.

A restock of supplies for the car were also in order, juice sweets and perhaps a sandwich I can’t really remember exactly. There in the far corner were some trinkets and souvenirs among which there was quite a good selection of lighters. The lighters wee mostly priced at around £1.00 but some were in to £2.00 bracket. I’d always just bought the cheap clipper lighters since I had a tendency to lose them quite quickly. This time however I decided to get one of the fancy ones. I have since of course mislaid this lighter but it started something, which I have continued for years now.

I guess strictly speaking lighters might just be classified as gadget especially if they are somewhat unusual, I now keep quite a keen look-out for gimmicky lighters, ones you won’t see everywhere else, I have a stipulation that they cannot cost more than £2.00 and they mustn’t resemble any I have previously bought i.e. no more than one gun type lighter. I have now gotten to the stage whereby people look for lighters for me and bring them back from holidays, my son has brought me back some crackers from Jamaica and Mexico, but they obviously cost more than £2.00 nonetheless they have entered my now proud collection, I have perhaps about 50 lighters now all working but seldom used. Some have multi-coloured flames some have high powered flames and some are just basic lighters. A few have flashing lights and fancy flames.

I do hope that the companies who make these novelty lighters keep doing so so that my collection many grow, it’s never going to be a collection that is worth a fortune and they are probably not the coolest gadget to most people but I do find some of them quite cool and others quite naff, but which ever category they are classified in they each hold a memory of somewhere we have travelled to, I can’t say hand o heart I remember where they ALL came from and on reflection once the collection got to a reasonable size categorising them and adding this kind of info might have been a good idea. I have added some photos so that you can get a general impression of the kind of lighters I collect, and from this you can judge the value of doing such a trivial thing for yourself. There are a few which obviously hold greater memories than others, but they all have a special place however silly that may sound.