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:

gayventure

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:

 pennycover

 

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!

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28 thoughts on “”

  1. I’ve never been able to understand collectors. I’ve a fair few albums (plenty of people have more), but I buy them because I like the music and I expect to play them. As long as it’s not something like the left arms of the people they’ve killed that they collect it’s an harmless enough hobby.

    I hope P likes your annual contribution to her collection.

  4. I have flirted with philately intermittently in my life. As an unworldly oik from the provinces I remember being rather awestruck by the SG shop on the Strand. Although I don’t have a collection any more I still love stamps and the thousand meanings and stories they convey, and I can honestly say it was for these intrinsic reasons, and not some autistic, completist geekism, that I collected. The ultimate demise of the common postage stamp will be one of the small sad consequences of the electronic age.

  7. YD – do you arrange them alphabetically or alphabetically within genre?

    CtW – P would bring the romantic out in pretty much anyone.

    Cronz – I don’t know about lucky but P is one of those people you can’t help but love.

    Menace – I find it is the letters they are attached to which fascinate me. Sometimes however, the stamps can shock. Looking through the beautiful coloured stamps I collected from Spain as boy I know realise that they are all pictures of General Franco.

    OTJ – She certainly seemed pleased.

    Norah – the dandruff bit or the BO bit?

  9. Great tradition – I hold on to my small stash of stamps collected when we (brother and i) where kids very fondly. We have some great Southern African ones – worthless probably but I love them. Last time I was in SG on the stand I went looking for stamps of Rock Paintings and the guy who helped me was clueless.

  10. That’s very sweet. I do collect lots of things – however never understood the fascination with stamps. I mean – what do you do with them? I collect things like music, shells, um.. actually thats about it.
    And yes I’m a girl who did have her CD’s in alphabetical order – didnt agonise over that though. I just liked to know where they were.

  11. With a Herculean effort, I won’t be using the ‘philately will get you nowhere’ joke. I hope you appreciate the sacrifice.
    …..
    We had a couple of the Gibbons catalogues at home when I was growing up. I loved them. They were so…..huge, and papery. And everything was small print, and the pictures were densely packed together.
    Hated stamps. But I loved those catalogues.
    And I liked looking at the Penny Blacks, and working out how many I’d need in a safe somewhere to be Completely Rich.
    …..
    That’s a lovely cover. You’re right: the little formalities mattered…..

  14. Sigh……you are the sweetest man.

    And em, I collected comics AND put them in bags and We don’t let the kids look at them.

    And em, I collected stamps as a kid. I still have my little book somewhere.

    But I do use deodorant. And so do dh. Phew.

    Valentines for us was eating chocolate and handing out forty cards to pre schoolers.

  15. Did you write this just to ruin everybody else’s valentines day? I hope you realise that women Europe wide, no less, are looking from Lady Durham’s letter, to the bunch of now wilting flowers, back to the letter, with a big despondent sigh.

    Men across the blogosphere want to do you damage for so cruelly highlighting their inadequacies.

  16. Actually Moobs, neither. I try to have albums by a single band together and then I have a tendency to order those by release date but other than that there’s no order to speak of.

  20. I have an album and a huge bag of stamps from when I was a kid, but I haven’t looked at them for years, they’re probably pretty dire mainly.

    I have to say, Penny is a lucky lady, that’s a really well thought out and amazing gift, moobs, I doff my hat to you. That is the best Valentines Day thing I have ever heard in my life, something truly thoughtful, perfect.

  22. I have tried to leave a comment on three occasions but have had no success. What I wanted to say was, it is sad that people write love letters by email these days because they will not be kept and will just end up in cyberspace. Wheras, that letter you gave P is just beautiful…I know she loved it because, well, who wouldn’t?

  27. Ahhh….
    Moobs…How terribly romantic…
    And I know of what you speak with a formal letter…
    My late friend used to send me wonderful wonderful letters on the most beautiful of stationary…
    They are my most treasured possession I have…
    I lovd the entire ritual of seeing my letter in the post…
    Having my letter opener.. and sitting in the window, smelling the stationary for a bit of him and then taking in his gracious words…
    God, I miss him…. And I miss those ‘moments’

  28. That’s one lucky Penny.

    You’re making me nostalgic for letter writing. Can I send you one, the old fashioned kind in an envelope with stamps and all?

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