I collected my first ticket at Alton Towers theme park in August 1995. Since then, I’ve kept tickets for pretty much anything I think is notable or unlikely to be repeated. Attractions, events, concerts, transport. My heart sinks when, instead of just checking, stamping, or tearing a ticket, staff take it away from me. On a few occasions I’ve asked for them back, to my wife’s shame. ‘Um, do you mind if I hold on to the ticket? I collect them, you see.’
After the kids were born, I kept their tickets too. This seemed all the more urgent, since they were doing things they couldn’t possibly remember.
Anyway, after Alton Towers, I was not in another theme park until a few weeks ago when we went to Legoland, outside Windsor.
Of course, I’d be adding the ticket of this unique, unjustly expensive, and much-hyped visit to my collection. When, sometime in the future, the kids would vaguely recall big Lego figures, extreme heat, heavy bars pinning their little thighs down, and hopefully, having fun with their parents, they could dig out the ticket that would prove it all happened at a particular place and on a particular date in their lives.
But where was this special relic? Oh. My wife’s phone.
The death of the paper ticket is underway. We did other things on our first big post-Covid trip to London, and there was a disturbing lack of stamping and tearing. Just scanning. Just beeping.
Realising this sent me sifting through my collection when I got home. Once contained in an envelope, it was later upsized to a pocket folder and now is in a nice, black TK Maxx box on the shelf.
What makes tickets so great? Three things: the record, the look, and the feel.
1 The record
Unlike the mass-produced knickknacks from the gift shop which lots of people will buy and soon lose or discard, tickets record the date, and often the exact time, when you and only you were in a place. They are the ultimate memento. As someone who always likes to chip in with, ‘This time last week we were…’ or ‘do you know what we were doing exactly twenty years ago?’, I find this historical aspect of tickets ridiculously interesting.
Here’s an old example, from a cable car in the French alps. There’s something remarkable about the contrast between the confident proof of the ticket’s info, and my hazy recollection of this ever happening.
I’ve even kept some parking tickets from here and there, not because the parking was magical, but because they record the times and dates of one part of a bigger experience.
2 The look
Hats off to the ticket designers who put at little effort in. It’s easy to just scrunch and toss them and ignore the fact that many tickets look terrific. How about this one, from a palace in Seoul?
This one, from the Empire State Building, is nice too and has the added point of interest that the seller stamped ‘zero visibility’, presumably to deter us from looking for our money back when we got to the top and realised the view was not like in the movies.
A cool and unique one for the city walls in Dubrovnik:
3 The feel
You also want a bit of meat in your ticket, a bit of texture. The most underwhelming type of ticket is the very thin paper kind that comes from a roll, like shop receipts. It’s better than nothing but, as my collection proves, the ink fades from these very quickly. By contrast, here are some firm movie stubs which have aged very well.
I’m also a fan of these card-shaped transport tickets which fit neatly in your wallet and also stand the test of time. They just look pretty.
Or here’s a wonderful, gigantic airline-style train ticket from Italy. I wonder do you still get these?
The stiffest ticket in my collection is this rock-hard rectangle from the heritage railway that runs between Bushmills and the Giant’s Causeway. A lovely item; no date sadly.
I’m sure there are many advantages to electronic tickets, none of which I am inclined to think about right now. Yes, we could save the Legoland tickets somewhere, but even if we managed this successfully (and do any of us know the long-term future of all our electronic info and photos?), I can’t imagine the kids opening a file in twenty or thirty years’ time and looking fondly at the arrangement of pixels which of course would not really be from the time that we visited, and certainly not the place.
Time and place. That’s what tickets do so well.
But I’m always happy to resist the inevitable, so I’ll keep collecting, inwardly cursing any teenager on a summer job with the audacity to snatch my boat trip ticket, and taking my collection off the shelf from time to time to recall and appreciate great times.
David Mitchell 