The doll collector

'This is the real star of the collection', says Cynthia Lole, wide eyes shining, holding up a 12 cm-high pink plastic doll to my face. It looks much the same as the hundred or so other pink plastic dolls arranged round the walls of her tiny west London flat. But not to Cynthia. 'Look! It's a boy!' she cries. 'I was so excited when I found it'. All Cynthia's others dolls are girls. Not girls in pretty dresses with blinking eyes and lots of hair, thought. She collects kewpie dolls -rubber dolls with pointed heads and round faces that have been manufactured in various countries

throughout the world for nearly a century.
Over the past five years or so she has gathered together big ones and little ones, sitting-up ones and lying-sown ones, crying kewpies, crawling kewpies, kewpies sucking their thumbs. There's a large 1930s kewpie, a rare black kewpie with no eyes, key-ring kewpies from Japan, a kewpie box whose head lifts off as the lid. 'They've all got slightly different expressions because they are of different ages and come from different countries,' she explains. 'This one's sweet, isn't she? She's Italian,' she says picking up a particularly attractive example with a cute smile and a round stomach.

In every shade of pink from strawberry ice-cream to flesh, the dolls form a six-deep guard on wall shelves in Cynthia Lole's spare bedroom. Ninety pairs of painted eyes seem to turn on you as you pass the door -they're not exactly threatening, but Cynthia says she's had business visitors drop their briefcases open-mouthed at the sight of them. The rearest examples are behind glass in the bathroom - tiny kewpies no more than four centimetres high from the 1920s. The very earliest ones were made from porcelain, but Cynthia's collection doesn't go back that far. 'It's a fun thing, so I don't want to spend big money. Most of these cost very little, although I did pay rather more for the boy.'

As with most collections, Cynthia's started with just one: a very ordinary example she bought in a local London market. 'Then I found a few more, and before I knew it, the dealers were saving them for me and people were buying me them as presents.' She had about 25 or so before she became a serious collector. 'I brought home this bright pink light from a film I'd been working on, and when I put it on in the bedroom, all the kewpies's eyes lit up and their heads started glowing. I thought -yeah!- I'm going to have a whole shelf of them with a light behind.'

Now Cynthia hunts down kewpies wherever she goes, from local street markets and specialist doll dealers to work trips abroad, from Philadelphia to Portugal, with her job making pop videos. Quick as a flash, she can remember the origin of each: 'That one I found in New York just as I was leaving to catch a plane. There it was for only a dollar. And that dear little one in the red suit a friend found in San Francisco.'

Kewpie dolls are the most recent of Cynthia's addictions, but the flat is a monument to a lifetime of collecting. She began in her childhood, probably as a reaction against her parents, who hated having lots of unnecessary things around and would say things like: 'Why do you need another vase if you've already got one?'

In the early days it was just cardboard boxes, but she started collecting seriously when she moved to London to work and discovered the street markets. One of her interests is old advertising signs and she also collects things from the videos she has worked on -a model 1950s plane hangs from the ceiling and there is a rubber octopus on the television. 1960s pop music plays on a 1954 jukebox machine that had to be brought in through the window when Cynthia moved here six years ago -she's got the measurements of the hall wrong and they even had to remove the window frame. 'Being such an enthusiastic collector does have its drawbacks,' she sighs. 'It's not only moving house -I've been warned I could never have a cleaner because it would take them hours just to dust and as for the dolls, they'd probably take one look and resign on the spot.'

(Contentísima con mis primeros ejercicios, contentísima!)