This one time, I was staying with my uncle in Paikakariki and I was dead bored. It is a tiny town with nothing to do. The only feature is a set of rail way tracks down the road. So I used to sit on the roof of the garage in a fold-away chair with a 3B1 notebook and write down the numbers of the train engines as they went back and forth, for hours at a time. Occasionally I would think a number sounded familiar and would look back in the notebook to see if I had seen that one before.
That’s it.
But, I was shocked, SHOCKED I tell you! To find out 15 years later that what I had been doing has a name: “Trainspotting”! Shocked because I thought I had invented it. And to find out that other people had done what I was doing… What a bunch of losers we were.