A special kind of mania

'The most compulsive collector is the American government ? it has amassed the most impressive collection of enemies of the state'

"It's all very short-sighted, pulling down statues of Saddam Hussein," said Alasdair. "They're going to be valuable collector's items one day. And I'll tell you what, I'd love to have a pack of those cards."

"Which cards?" said Dotti.

"You know, those playing-cards that the Americans issued to their troops, showing the faces of Saddam's henchmen. That's an instant collector's item if I ever saw one. I bet they're being bought and sold already."

Alasdair is an old mate of mine from London days, a journalist and a fellow hoarder. We both tend to hang on to things. At various times in my life, I have started amassing beer mats, cigarette cards, playing cards, postcards, 78rpm records and even different kinds of chewing gum once, and although I lose interest in them after a while, I occasionally come across the relics of one of these abortive collections, like the kind of trove you find in burial mounds.

(Maybe that's the real reason why you find those things in burial mounds. It's all the stuff that the late chieftain was amassing during his life, and when he died, his wife breathed a huge sigh of relief and chucked it all in the grave with him. "He can bloody well take it with him," she said. Thousands of years later, the grave is opened, and an archaeologist then spends a lifetime trying to work out the significance of the artefacts. Believe me – it's just male clutter, mate, male clutter.)

Being journalists, both Alasdair and I tend to keep old papers and articles, though I think I am worse in that respect than Alasdair, which is maybe why he once sent me a cutting about an aged actress in New York who had kept every single review and press mention she had ever had in a huge pile of cuttings in her bedroom. One day, the whole caboodle had fallen forward and crushed her to death. Alasdair had added no comment. He didn't need to. I went on collecting old papers, but thenceforward I made them into smaller piles.

What brought on this talk of collecting was not just the thought of the post-Saddam world of Saddamiana, but the fact that we had just come out of a temple of collecting. Alasdair and Dotti had come down from London for the weekend, and we'd gone off to Frome for the Saturday farmers' market. While there, I'd taken them on a wander up St Katharine's Hill to see a fabulous shop of collectables run by a man called Steve, who all his life has been amassing ephemera and then discovered that the best way of getting rid of it is selling it. Programmes, postcards, music, newspapers (Daily Mirror with front page saying "KENNEDY KILLED – JACKIE SPATTERED WITH BLOOD"), Lilliput magazines in see-through bags, posters, old Beanos... No wonder he calls it The Shop That Time Forgot.

It's the sort of stuff that you would never need but that you fleetingly conceive a tremendous desire to have. Why else would Alasdair be unable to resist a late-1950s souvenir programme called "Summer Stars", with big photos of all the Delfont performers on show that year – a baby-faced Bruce Forsyth, Frankie Vaughan, Harry Secombe etc. The only one I hadn't heard of was a singer called Gary Miller.

"He died young," said Alasdair. "I know his son quite well. That's why I'm getting it. It's a present for him."

Oh, yeah? We can all think of reasons for getting things we don't need to get. Why, for instance, did I then buy a pack of Daily Telegraph playing-cards, showing the 1950s façade of the old Fleet Street HQ? Because, my reasoning went, I am getting a perfectly good pack of cards for only £2, half the price I would pay for a new pack. The fact that I've got loads of perfectly good packs of cards at home already doesn't even impinge on my mind.

Still, I'm not the most compulsive collector on the block. That honour goes to the US government. For 50 years now, it has been amassing the world's most impressive collection of enemies of the state. From time to time, it nominates some foreign figure as collectable, and that foreign figure then becomes untouchable. That's not quite what the White House says, of course. What the White House actually says is, "This man is evil and an enemy of America and must be got rid of", but that is enough to ensure that the opposite happens and the enemy becomes part of the collection for ever.

It happened to Castro 50 years ago. It happened to Gaddafi 30 years ago. Since then, it has happened to Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden. And when I heard that the White House had finally decided to eliminate Saddam Hussein, I thought to myself: "Aha! They've added another one to the collection! Lucky old Saddam!"