So, what’s the deal with the mysterious acronym? AFOL stands for an Adult Fan Of Lego, a cohort that is an absolute gift for Danish plastic brick behemoth and creator of the “this will probably do for a tenner” gift for kid’s birthday parties, Lego. An AFOL has the time, space, and disposable income to spend on building plastic brick models that are definitely not toys but are instead Serious Models. Anyone can be an AFOL, but given that one of the biggest selling product lines are from the Star Wars franchise, you probably can form a picture in your head of what a typical AFOL may look like.
Besides, who doesn’t enjoy a little regression into the fun times of childhood? Sign me up! My first foray into grown-up Lego was from a range called Lego Architecture. In these kits, the most famous landmarks from an international city of splendor (New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hull, etc) are arranged in a nice little 3D montage. My set was of the city of San Francisco, one of my favourite cities (although admittedly the majority of my time visiting there was spent drinking Dirty Martinis rather than admiring the iconic constructions).
After emptying the contents of the box, it was pretty clear that this wasn’t going to be a time-consuming endeavour. Plus, the beauty of lego is that even if you do fuck something up, it was easy to rectify by pulling pieces apart with your nails, teeth, or some ingenious orange nails/teeth saving device that seems to have become standard issue in kits after my youth. Even by pacing out the steps to prolong the enjoyment by having a coffee break every 3 pages, I was done in about an hour. The finished article did look pretty cool though, and there was something quite satisfying in seeing how the whole thing came together. Maybe this could be the start of a beautiful collection?
It was as I started researching a second kit when it was pretty clear that this would not exactly be a cheap hobby. Everyone has their passions, but I guess I just didn’t feel passionate enough to justify upwards of three hundred pounds on a FREAKING LEGO CAR, even a well-engineered lego car for grown-ups. My frugal (A.K.A. skinflint) streak kicked in, and it didn’t take long to find a budget version of a plastic-brick-construction-toy-but-definitely-not-Lego version of the London skyline. Bricks are bricks, right? How bad could it be?
Phrases like “you get what you pay for” enter the common lexicon for a reason, and it’s fair to say that my economy-Lego London was less of a miniature monument to England’s capital, and more of an 8-bit pixelated rendition. There were no custom plastic shapes that would render it’s buildings in glorious detail; only square or rectangular bits. Lots of tiny, fiddly, shit-I’ve-dropped-another-one-on-the-carpet pieces. What’s that red rectangle? A classic phone box? Or maybe a post box? What about that black rectangle? A London taxi? A hearse? A portal to the Underworld? Whatever your imagination wanted it to be! The London Eye kept falling off, running amok in front of Buckingham Palace. Damn you Lego and your fine quality product, you win this round.
I was finally left with Plan C; The kids had amassed what I had judged to be a shitload of Lego, which I claimed as my stash, and went looking for things to build with what I thought was a bountiful resource. However, as I looked at various instructions for some fun builds, it became clear that having a lot of same-colour bricks was essential to building anything big, where in the boy’s collection consisted of a small, random assortment of common bricks then lots of useless things like bridges, windows, wheels and a surplus of radar dishes. Inevitably, I lowered my ambitions and ended up building 8-bit video game characters, which actually was still a fairly fun way to pass the time and easy to hide on bookshelves to surprise the kids. It turns out that after all I wasn’t really cut out for being a true Adult Fan of Lego, but being an occasional fan of children’s Lego would be just fine.
Failing At Leisure 
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