Once upon a Blaugust, I hatched a plan to fill out the extra days by posting about my badges (Or buttons. Or pins. Whatever your local vernacular calls them.) At the time, I'd just found a plastic bagful and it seemed like something I might be able to spin up into a mini-series. Well, that didn't happen. And it's not going to happen this year, either. When I tipped the bag out and looked through the collection it didn't spark much joy, as the extremely trite and glib saying goes. I didn't think I'd be able to come up with enough amusing or interesting anecdotes based on the random selection of cheap metal buttons to justify a post, let alone a series. Times change and so do moods. Looking a that bag today I reckon I could work the contents up into something. Whether it would be something worth reading is another matter but a thousand words is a thousand words. And one day I might do it, too, but this is not the day and those images you see up there at the top are not those badges. Nope. This is another bunch of badges I found at the back of a drawer a week ago, which qualifies them for inclusion in this Blaugust's pointless makeweight series, Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer. They literally could not be more qualified. It's not even a metaphor! Why these ended up there instead of with the rest I have no idea but it's an eclectic selection. When I was a teenager and a twenty-something, badges were very much A Thing. Everyone went around covered in the things; on jackets, on bags, on hats, on anything you could stick a pin through. I bought or otherwise acquired dozens of badges over a couple of decades and I took as much care in the wearing and display of them then as I do with my tee-shirts now. (I'm known in certain circles for my tee-shirts, I'll have you know. I might have to do a post about that some day. They're all modern, though, my tees. I don't collect them, I just buy them and wear them.) This selection is very mixed. It's a bit of a cross-section of the whole, in a way. I have no idea why these particular examples ended up in the same place. They certainly couldn't have been worn all at the same time. I think they're all broadly from the '90s and that's as tight as I can narrow it. Let me take you through them, as far as I can. There's a few I don't even recognize. They might not be mine. Well, they are now... 1 - Batman. Specifically, the Batman from the highly-rated 1990s TV show, Batman: The Animated Series. Catchy title. I own this on VHS but I only watched a few episodes. The animation is excellent but I found it a little dull. No idea where I got the badge from. (That's a sentiment you're going to get very fed up of hearing by the end of this post.) 2, 4, 10 and, I believe, probably 7 and 8 as well - Fresh Nation. Fresh Nation was a clothes shop and brand in the '90s. I used to shop there quite a bit. They specialized in a kind of rave/skate/graffiti culture look, lots of cartoon figures and bold graphics. I'm a little surprised there's no Wikipedia page. Looking it up now, it seems it was a much more local operation than I was aware of at the time. I might still have a couple things of theirs at the back of the wardrobe (I don't actually have a wardrobe.) but they haven't been fit to wear for a couple of decades. I imagine I picked those badges up off the counter as freebies when I was shopping there. 3, 11, 26, 29 - Literally no idea. Can't remember ever seeing them before. I did wear slogan badges but usually the messages would either be surreal or humorous. "Deal With It" is not a phrase I would ever have been likely to say or indeed think. As for the cat, it's more of a brooch than a badge. It's nice, too. I'd wear it now. I was Team Cat for the longest time, before I became Team Fox and now, thanks to Beryl, Team Dog. I didn't wear cat badges often though, unless they were famous cartoon cats. The little one is some ineffable design that means nothing and the last one means just as little, even with the word "Touchmark" slapped all over it . Looks like a brand logo but I can't recall ever seeing it before. Google has no suggestions. 5 - I've never been to Paignton Zoo. I'm not sure I've even been to Paignton. I probably bought this in a junk shop or a market. In the 90s, I bought a lot of stuff that way before I started playing EverQuest and switched to collecting completely useless virtual crap instead. 6. I ate a lot of Mini-Rolls as a child. And I mean A Lot. I had the kind of metabolism then that let me eat ridiculous amounts of sweets, biscuits, cakes, chocolate, bread... you name it, without putting on an ounce. If it was sweet or stodgy and full of useless calories, I ate it. And I was stick-thin. It didn't catch up with me until my mid-20s, when I finally stopped being able to eat enough for three people and still look underfed. Luckily for me, once I figured out what had happened, my reaction was to eat less so I've carried on looking much the same all the way through to now. That badge is a 90s one, I'd bet, so clearly I still must have thought Mini-Rolls were cool then. I know better now. Mini-Rolls are not and have never been cool. No wiki entry for Mini-Rolls, either. 9. Aha! This is a good one! Strumpet is the name of a song by one of my favorite bands of the 90s, My Life Story. I saw them three times. Might have been four. I imagine this badge came from one of those gigs. I have a much better trophy, though. It's framed on the wall a few feet from where I'm sitting. The number 12. I believe I may have told that story, such as it is, before. 12 - Another Batman badge. I don't even like Batman all that much. Why all the badges beats me. 13 - Hmm. That's a weird one. The wolf looks vaguely familiar but I can't place it. It's a thin metal circle with no rim. The writing looks Cyrillic? Again, it might be a bit ravey? Rave culture was big back then... 14, 18 - Two Proof of Admission badges from UKCAC, the United Kingdom Comic Arts Convention. It was organized and run every year by some close friends of mine, all through the 80s into the 90s. I think I was at all of them. I worked some, too, but mostly I tried to avoid doing that. If you're hosting a panel it means you can't really start drinking seriously until it's over and that's no fun! 15 - I can't even... what? Heinz Meanz Bard? Is there a joke there I'm not getting? 16 - Everyone likes crisps (Chips to you, if you're reading this from the States.) but Golden Wonder, despite being very successful, are not great crisps. Not something I'd want to advertise or even associate myself with. Can't imagine how I would have come by it or why I kept it. 17 - Fantastic was a comic published in the 1960s by Odhams. Along with its slightly less-successful sister publication, Terrific, it specialized in reprinting Marvel Comics several years late, in black and white and re-sized. I worshiped it as a child. It was my gateway drug into the Marvel Universe. I already had a DC addiction from the much stronger, undiluted real thing which was freely available in most newsagents. So were Marvel comics but distribution was utterly unreliable, so the single-issue stories DC were still putting out were much more appealing than Marvel's multi-issue epics, half of whose episodes you knew full well you'd never find. Except in Fantastic. I still have all those Fantastics and Terrifics. They're in the loft. They might be worth something if I hadn't cut all the back covers off. There was usually a super hero pin-up on the back and my bedroom wall was covered in them. The badge looks like an original but I didn't get it in the '60s. I bought that one in the '90s, I'm pretty sure. 19 - As I did this nifty, enamel Butlins pin. I have a vague memory of going to Butlins as a child but I can't remember much about it. I have an equally vague memory of buying this badge about thirty years later because I thought it looked cool in an ironic, retro style. It was all bloody post-modernism as far as the eye could see in the '90s. 20, 21, 28 - And the same motivation would have led to me buying these three. I mean, look at them... They're still weirdly retro-cool even now, after that sort of thing has been absolutely flogged into the ground. The Ever Ready Solar Spaceman one is really tempting. I might start wearing some of these again, as ironic contrast, on my very modern tee shirts. Hmm. KPop Demon Hunters tee with the Esso Tiger... [Edit: Looking at it more closely, I think that's actually a badge from a protest about Esso, not an Esso badge. Greenpeace ran one in 2001 so Google tells me but that image doesn't feature. I coldn't stand Greenpeace then anyway. Or now, if they still exist.] I don't, in fact, own a KPop Demon Hunters tee, to be clear. But I'm not averse to the idea of getting one. 22 - Another quality enamel pin. I'm guessing that logo might be Warner Bros.? Not sure. 23 - Glaxo Babies! Now that has to be an original. It's water-damaged, too, suggesting it saw some wear. The Glaxos, as we used to call them, were one of my favorite Bristol bands of the late '70s. I saw them a bunch of times, headlining and supporting, and they were always great. They had that herky-jerky post-punk funk sound down to perfection. Their first album is really excellent. They had to change their name after a while because of legal threats from whoever owns Glaxo (It's GlaxoSmithKline, of course, now known as GSK.) They changed it to the Gl*xo Babies. That told those pesky billionaires! They'd disappeared into the fog of time until Alex Turner and Miles Kane's Last Shadow Puppets started covering the Glaxos' This Is Your Life. 24 - Hang on! Bootlegger turn! This one's an official NVQ pin. You got one if you successfully completed the program, which I did back in the '90s. In fact, I beta'd the damn thing. I was working at British Telecom at the time, one of the UK's largest employers, and my bit of the company was asked to test the rollout of the new National Vocational Qualification. With a degree already, I didn't really need a non-degree level equivalent but what the hell. They gave me time to do it at work, so I did it. Technically I have that on my CV, for what good it ever did me. 25 - Peppermint Patty is my favorite Peanuts character, as I'm pretty sure almost anyone who's been paying attention would easily have been able to guess. Red hair, freckles, sassy as hell, always looks cool, has massive self-confidence except when she thinks too much... pushing all the buttons there. I like Snoopy too. Who doesn't? So it's a double-header. It's also one of those big badges that you can really only wear one or at most two of at the same time without looking like a local radio DJ. 27 - It's fate! Saved the best for last without even trying! Dolly Mixture are/is, as any fule kno, my favorite band of all time. I have a post to come in this very series about something very interesting relating to the Dollies that I found, yes, in the back of a drawer. I'll save the details for the post. This badge, though... It's from the late '70s/early '80s. I remember wearing it all the time back then. I think I had more than one, though, so this might not be the actual one I wore. Did they throw them out at gigs? I don't think so. Maybe I got it in a record shop? I doubt it because I never saw a physical record by them until long after. It's a mystery. Although not much of one, admittedly. And there we are. As pointless posts go, this one's right up there but I did at least manage to keep it fairly short. Short is good.