So at this point, you can actually look at the year you were born and go, "I'm as old as the movie Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace!" or "This Baring-Gould Annotated and I came out in the same year!" (Well, maybe you came out in a different year than the one in which you were born, but you can pick a different book for each occasion.)
We have solid Sherlockian collectibles that match our own lives on this Earth.
My favorite issues of The Baker Street Journal had always been the ones with my birth year on the cover, and the opportunity to see what the Sherlockian elders were doing the year I came screaming into their unknowing world. They, of course, looked aged long before I did, although I seem to be catching up.
One starts to wonder how much of a shelf one could fill collecting Sherlockiana from the year one was born. Books and movies are easy to put dates on -- figurines, artifacts, and the like might be harder to pin down, unless they were part of a movie release. But in an era where there is far too much Sherlockiana to just collect everything, targeting a specific year might be an excellent quest to embark on . . . and the objects would possess their own magic, being tied to your lifespan like Voldemort's horcruxes without the side effects.
And even without collecting, it's just kind of fun to explore your natal era's Sherlockian history. You might even find the Sherlockian who passed just as you were coming in, whose spirit bumped yours and caused you to catch the spiritual virus we all share. Personally, I was in the nine-month spiritual waiting room when Christopher Morley was moving along to the house-boat on the Styx, so I've always liked that possibility. Who knows who you could have encountered, even if its just in your current imagination?
Time is fun to play in, as any companion of Doctor Who soon learns, and as Sherlockians, we have a whole lot of it for our playground. Take a spin on its merry-go-round sometime and see where you wind up!
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