IF YOU EVER find yourself seated next to a velologist at a dinner party, settle in.

Velology is the study and collection of tax discs, and yes, it is a real word, with a real community behind it, an active Facebook group swapping scans of rare finds, and a proper publication, The Velologist, running for decades.

A rare 1921 disc, from the very first year of issue, holds the collectors’ record at over £1,300. Someone out there has spent more on a scrap of expired paper than most people spend taxing an actual car for a year, and they will happily tell you why, at length, given the chance. 

Velologists are about to have a bittersweet couple of years, because the object of their affection is being phased out.

There’s a particular kind of Irish windscreen archaeology that anyone over 40 will recognise, whether they know the word velology or not. Peel back the current tax disc in its little plastic holder, and there’s a decent chance you’ll find one, two, sometimes three expired predecessors stacked up behind it like sedimentary rock.

Nobody meant to create a tiny paper time capsule of their motoring history. It happened by accident, through pure inertia. The plastic holders went brittle and sun-baked over time, peeling the old disc out cleanly became a genuine hassle, and sliding the new one in front was simply easier than doing it properly.

Multiply that laziness by a decade of renewals and you had, without ever intending to, a little archive of your own driving life curling up behind the glass.

That object, mundane, slightly absurd, quietly beloved, is now living out its final years on Irish roads.

I’ll admit to a small pang of recognition........

© TheJournal