The End of an Era

A passion for LEGO is generally a joyous thing, but it does have a couple of obvious downsides. One is the ever-present spectre of bankruptcy as more and more purchases are made and ever more cash pours into the Billund money pit. The other is the ongoing quest for places to store and display all the LEGO purchases.

I'm not sure how others deal with the space issue; for me it's a constant problem, and one that I've blogged about in the past. Right now it's a case of keeping most of my sets packed up in their boxes, while displaying a limited number of constructed models in strategic locations around the house. These locations are, I regret, highly regulated in my household - the LEGO equivalent of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. That having been said, I recently won a major strategic victory, persuading she-who-must-be-obeyed that it would be a good idea to display Tower Bridge in a communal location (i.e. our hallway). Previously only the Winter Toy Shop and the Winter Village Bakery were allowed in there. The benchmark appears to be aesthetic beauty. Or more accurately, my wife's definition of aesthetic beauty. Hence my Star Wars UCS sets are banned from communal locations, but Tower Bridge, the Toy Shop and the Bakery are deemed less of an eyesore and therefore grudgingly accepted. So a note to LEGO : please make the Star Wars UCS models less grey and angular in future. Make them pink, maybe. Or maybe not....

Winter Village Bakery and Toyshop - aesthetically pleasing, apparently.

Anyway, on 7th March last year I filled one of the designated display locations with a model. Not any model, however - it was Set 10179 UCS Millennium Falcon, the biggest, baddest Star Wars set ever. This collossus ended up on my chest of drawers in the bedroom (below) as there was, to be frank, nowhere else big enough to accomodate its prodigious bulk apart from the floor (not an option) or the dining room table (definitely not an option). And it's been a sore point ever since, my wife bemoaning the fact that it's pretty much the last thing she sees when going to bed at night, and then the first thing that she sees when she wakes in the morning. I of course can't see what's wrong with that at all, but there's no accounting for taste.....

The Falcon was briefly displaced from its lofty perch when we moved house last year, being carried carefully and gingerly in the boot (UK)/trunk (US) of a car from the old house to the new prior to regaining its position on top of the same chest of drawers in the new house, where it has remained until now.

But not for much longer. I've taken the painful decision that regardless of how many parsecs she takes to complete the Kessel run, it's time for Han Solo's "fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy" to be decommissioned, and for the Fourth Plinth to be liberated in order that another model can have a taste of the limelight.

Any thoughts on what would be a fitting replacement for the Falcon ? I'm thinking 10221 Super Star Destroyer, but I'm open to suggestions.....