Just the ticket: why I love collecting stubs

I know the exact day when my future life as a critic was set on its course, because I still have the ticket stub to prove it. It was 5 June 1992 — seat D4 at the 8.15 p.m. screening, to be precise — when I went to the Curzon Phoenix cinema in central London with three schoolfriends to see what would become my all-time favourite film (and, subsequently, book), Merchant Ivory’s Oscar-winning masterpiece Howards End. That perforated ticket stub, a little raggedy around the edges now, sits in pride of place on one of the three cork pinboards I display in rotation on the wall of my bedroom, all of which host a mini patchwork quilt of tickets for plays, films and exhibitions I’ve seen.

For 28 years I have maintained these pinboards carefully, arranging and overlapping the tickets neatly with a series of jauntily coloured drawing pins. For me they represent the most glorious items of home decor, as valuable and evocative as any book, painting or piece of furniture. They are snapshots of a time, a place and a happy memory that I can recall each morning as I sit up in bed and catch sight of them: that musical in Sheffield, that film at my favourite cinema in Rotterdam, that visit to the art gallery in Porto. Yet when I see the ticket for the film Misbehaviour (14 March 2020, 6 p.m. at Picturehouse Central, Piccadilly Circus) I feel anxious: will this be the last item I ever add to my decades-old collection?

It is, I admit, not the gravest consequence of the pandemic, but Covid-19 looks as if it may kill off paper tickets for good. Paper, previously an unexceptionably neutral substance, is now a key public enemy, a potential hotbed of germs and hand-to-hand virus transmission.