Completer-finisher

So... what's the fascination with Lego and Star Wars?  I loved both as a child and then fell out of love with both of them during the second half of the 1990s.  

Lego was first: I just slowly switched from Lego to video games and my bass guitar and at some point in about 1995, I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life and sold almost all of my Lego.  I had lots and it took some months to build and sell over 100 sets.  

I kept just 4: the amazing technic Test Car (8865), the Alienator (6876) which was my favourite Blacktron set, the Twin Wing Spoiler (6828) which sat on a shelf and got badly sun damaged, and a single Town set (6675).  These went largely forgotten for the next 8 years of so while I spent far too long at university.  

Meanwhile, George Lucas did his best to kill Star Wars by introducing Jar Jar Binks and a terrible "romance" between the infantile Ani and Padme.  I was so incensed by the decision to release the film in the US a whole month before it came out in the UK that I used the power of the internet to find a bootleg which didn't even then fit on my computer hard drive.  So a load of us got beers and gathered in the room of the one friend with a powerful-enough computer some time in May 1999 when I should have been revising for my finals and... proceeded to get more angry at the trashing of all my favourite childhood tropes. To be fair, I was never angry enough to not see a new Star Wars film at the cinema but it took Rogue One to really restore my faith.  

In the meantime, way after I sold all my Lego, my younger sister finally decided to switch from my little ponies to Lego.  And in late 2002, a catalogue came through the post to her from Lego.  Just before it went into the recycling, I flicked through it and was captivated by the incredible UCS ISD 10030.  I pooled Christmas and birthday money (they fall very close together) and, on Christmas day 2002, sat down for 8 hours to build.  And that was the start of the journey.  I later bought the UCS Y-Wing (10134) and, just before it was retired, the UCS SSD (10221).  Neither of these quite lived up to the grandeur of the ISD but kept me "in the game".  In the meantime, I got a job, got married, bought a house and generally didn't do very much more with Lego for some years, apart from the occasional Christmas build of the ISD.  

Then I discovered Rebrickable and Bricklink and decided to make good on my failure to buy the only set which stood up to the ISD: the amazing Millennium Falcon (10179). 30 or 40 deliveries later, I was ready to build... and that was me hooked.  I started buying some more Start Wars Lego, some new, some second hand from Ebay, some build from parts.  At some point I created a spreadsheet to log which ones I had and hadn't got and then it became an obsession.  I'm the sort of person that plays Angry Birds until I have three stars on every level and all the achievements and then stops playing entirely.  I played Worm on my Nokia 3310 until one night I managed to fill the entire screen with my worm and it ate its tail; I never played again.  I now have 90% of the Lego Star Wars sets ever released and am within sight of the finishing line, though it is now getting an increasingly expensive obsession.

What is this blog going to do?  I'm going to document the last stages of my attempt to complete my Star Wars Lego collection and hopefully compare some of the different versions.  Maybe someone will find it interesting... probably it will go completely unread!