Author: Moobs

P has a stamp collection. This may well come as a surprise to many of you as philatelists are not only pretty much always men but a particular sort of man too. All men have a tendency to view anything of which they have more than 4 as a “collection”. I have yet to meet any woman who has ever agonised over what order to place their CDs on a shelf or who have resorted to buying children’s comics, carefully placing them in UV-blocking plastic envelopes and then refusing to allow children within the climate-controlled room in which they are kept. Even amongst men however, there are degrees of acquisitive obsession.

For the lost souls – the ones who are a stranger to deodorant and who hope that their ripe scent is sufficiently laced with pheremones to one day render unconscious as she passes the woman they have been waiting all their lives for (that is any woman) – the centre of the universe is Stanley Gibbons on the Strand. It is close enough to Trafalgar Square for the alarming musk of the unwashed stamp collector almost to drive out the odour of pigeon shit. It is not a place I feel at home. I bought a stamp album as a boy but something about it was telling me subliminally that it represented a greater lifestyle choice than was perhaps immediately apparent:

As I crossed the threshold of Stanley Gibbons earlier this week I was, despite it all, relaxed. I walked through to the back, past the packets of stamp hinges and the collections of Burundi definitives depicting Scout Masters of the World. I arrived at the stamp counter and pulled up one of the bar stools. To my right a man with bottle-bottom glasses and hair apparently transplanted from his nose was ranting and a placid-looking assistant over the price of a small orange piece of paper. Next to him a teenager dressed in a shell suit and sporting Olympic-standard acne was quietly turning over the pages of a ring binder, sighing.

I know to wait patiently whilst the assistants complete their filing. Eventually, one turned to me and after some flickering eye contact he asked how he could help. I went into my spiel:

“I am after unusual penny stamps, Valentine’s day covers or other unsual covers”.

Immediately another assistant said: “Ah, I think you usually deal with me. I’ll deal with this”

He asks me how my year has been and I enquire about what the last 12 months have brought him. This little ritual has been going on now for 15 years. For our first Valentine’s day together I racked my mind for an unusual gift for P (whose name is Penny). I settled on buying her a Penny Black stamp. It was a weak pun used as an excuse to buy something precious for a woman I was hopelessly in love with. Every year thereafter I have gone back until I have become, without ever meaning to, an eccentric fixture in the shop’s calendar. As the dandruff swirled around us, the assistant and I sorted through the prettiest covers he could find, conspiring once again to bring about a small victory for romance.

This year I settled upon two covers including this one:

 

 

It is a letter to sent to a Lady Durham in 1845 and was sealed with red wax. I love email, but sometimes I miss the tiny ritual formalities that letter writing required.

I hope you all had the most romantic February 14ths!

The Law has been blighted by the invention of the photocopier. Back in the good old days for which all barristers pine (the 1780s in case you were wondering), getting a document copied meant sending it to a copyist who would dip a quill in ink and painstakingly transcribe. No 4000 page bundles in those days. To cope we have had to resort to trolley bags to drag our instructions around. I have a range of them and my current favourite is an enormous and stylish Mandarina Duck one. Before today it had only be used once: to carry home P’s dirty laundry from Scotland.

My client today is the World’s largest Law Firm. That is quite a client to have. I was pleased. They wanted me to represent them by which I mean someone was suing them and they want me as their lawyer. I was most pleased. Anxious to make a good impression I broke out the quality luggage and made my way to their Canary Wharf Skyscraper.

Having been shown into a plush conference suite, I chatted lightly as I unpacked my files. Opening the zip with a flourish I noticed that a pair of P’s knickers had somehow lain hidden in the depths of the bag and were now flopped nonchalantly across the top of my papers. I cast a glance at the clients but they were all filling bone china cups with delicious fresh teas. I could still get away with this. I flicked at the underwear with my hand and it dropped into one of the bag’s recesses and, mercifully, out of sight. I then piled the files onto the table and zipped the bag shut again. I paused to regain my composure and began to set out my advice. I found it unnerving that none of them were looking at me. Instead they were focused on a point about a foot in front of me. I looked at my files nervously. No underwear appeared to be attached. What was it that had so grabbed their attention? Could it, I wondered, be the sturdy and extravagantly curled pubic hair that was sat atop the uppermost file?

I grabbed the file and followed their eyes as the hair slipped from its surface, twirled to the table top and then slid onto their handmade carpet. At that point I didn’t know where to look so I focused on the other file. Well now, what a coincidence! It too was sporting a merry-looking pube. As everyone in the room was thoroughly professional no-one asked me how well I’d got to know the papers.