If you’ve just finished a night of drinking in Johannesburg and you suddenly feel like some meth, it’s handy to know you can buy a gram there for around £20. Or if you’re in Tehran and require the services of a prostiute, you can expect to pay around £40. What if you’re in Cambodia and need a cloned number plate for a stolen car? Don’t sweat it, you can buy one for less than a fiver.
I don’t know this from experience of course, I lead a life so vanilla that I make Cliff Richard look like Lemmy from Motörhead. No, I learned all this from a site called Havocscope, who provide you with a price list of black market goods around the world like guns, drugs and exotic animals. And it’s absolutely fascinating.
A work colleague of mine has just paid £3000 for a French Bulldog puppy, but for just £2500 she could’ve had a tiger cub. Mrs Kitforbrains wants to upgrade our house security with a fancy alarm system that costs £500. However, I could save myself £200 and buy an AK47, which would be far more effective. And, for the price of a rocket launcher in Iraq, I’ve just bought my ‘holy grail’ football shirt.
Now, spending this much on a shirt is a big deal for me. Previously, the most I’ve spent on a ‘vintage’ shirt was £40, so paying over 3 times that is a shock to the system. Not that I’ve overpaid (I’ve got a bargain if anything), but there was still a moment of hesitation before clicking ‘send’ on PayPal, thinking if spending this amount on a shirt is the right thing to do.
But I had to. It’s a grail. You know, one of the mythical shirt deities that reside atop of your mental Mount Olympus that are simultaneously unobtainable and yet deep down you know you’re destined to own them, some day.
Maybe after a lottery win though.
Because that seems to be a common feature of all grails- they’re expensive. And they cost so much because they’re rarer than an honest politician. A grail shirt *can’t* be readily available, it needs to play hard to get. You need to put in the hard work, set up saved searches, track down leads on Twitter, spend many sleepless nights scrolling eBay in bed after your partner has gone to sleep.
And even though ‘Holy Grail’ suggests an air of superiority, the shirt can be from even the humblest of teams. A match worn Maradona is obviously worth selling vital organs for, but a limited run Scunthorpe away shirt only worn for one match can be just as desirable to somebody out there.
Yes, ‘Grail’ means different things to different people. For some, a match worn Manchester United shirt would take pride of place framed above the fire in their living room, others wouldn’t even wash their car with it. This makes pricing a one all the more difficult.
When I started Kit For Brains, I had the idea to give a rough valuation of each of the shirts I featured. I abandoned this plan roughly one week in when I realised that shirt prices go up and down like the stock market. Who’d have thought it’d be easier to value a kilo of cocaine in Juarez than a Plymouth Argyle home shirt?
Anyway, my grail is on the way, and I’ve never been more nervous about receiving a shirt. Is it in good shape? Will I find a cheaper one next week? Will it turn up at all even, after all I’ve had parcels go missing in transit before, never to be seen again.
So I’ll sit and wait, hoping that divine intervention will get the shirt to me. And after that? The next grail, of course. This could get expensive.
I shouldn’t have told Mrs KitForBrains how cheap hitmen are…
Kit For Brains 
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