The Poster Wall wasn’t always a poster wall. It started out as the Wooden Wall; 2.8 meters wide, plain-shaped, brownish-yellowish in colour, and consisting of 46.5 identical slats (I counted). However, it turned out there’s a limit on how much brownish-yellowish identicalness a person can handle. As a result the wall soon became known as the Ugly Wall. And not much after that it was dubbed the Ugly BORING Wall, at which point I decided something had to be done. Covering it up with things that weren’t brownish-yellowish and/or identical seemed the best – or at any rate the cheapest – solution to the problem. Cue the posters.
The original version of the Poster Wall had a rather ambiguous personality. I didn’t own too many posters back then and had to use literally all I had to cover the full span of the wall. In the bottom left corner I put a poster of a long-haired Heinz-Harald Frentzen, posing next to a pile of Good Year-tyres. I’d gotten it half a decade before from a friend of my father’s who wanted to be rid of it. (I can’t imagine why.) The top and middle of the wall I covered in posters torn from F1 magazines. In the centre I placed a picture of my back then recently deceased Pomeranian dog. And on the right side I placed the biggest Lion King-poster the world has ever seen. My aunt had won it at the neighbourhood fair. It was as tall as the Poster Wall itself, bright orange, and no matter how many pins I stuck in it, it’d invariably fall down every 2 weeks.
At first I only changed the Poster Wall lay-out sporadically, as it was hard finding new posters. (Needless to say that, when I finally did find some new ones, the Monster of Loch Lion King was the very first to go.) Nowadays, with all the races I visit, the search has become much easier. If I wanted to, I could change a poster every month. But since it’s a rather time-consuming job, I usually limit myself to one extreme make-over every December. This year I’ve decided to replace 12 of the 17 posters that were on the wall. The only ones that get to stay for another twelve months are the FIA GT event poster from Zandvoort 2013, the old Formula Abarth-poster of a now-GP2 driver and Audi’s Nürburgring24 First Victory-poster. Oh, and the picture of my dog is still there too. It’s been on the wall for so long now, it’s become tradition.
Sometimes I do wonder if I haven’t gotten a bit too old to own a Poster Wall.
I probably have. Way too old.
But it’s such a fun way of tracking how life changes. At the start, the wall was full of F1 cars because I foolishly believed F1 was the only racing series worth watching. Now that I know better, there’s not a single F1 car left. It’s mostly GTs and junior formula cars now. Also, if I’m entirely honest, I’m a bit scared to take the posters down. In the last days of the Ugly BORING Wall I was literally prepared to take an axe to it, no matter the consequences. Imagine what I might end up doing if, starting tomorrow, I’d be confronted day in day out with a Restored Ugly BORING Wall ft. Ten Thousand Tiny Even Uglier Holes. I guess I’d rather be childish than find out.