{"id":136,"date":"2007-02-17T10:47:17","date_gmt":"2007-02-17T10:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moobz.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2007-02-17T12:34:42","modified_gmt":"2007-02-17T12:34:42","slug":"philately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moobz.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00c2\u00a0any woman who has ever\u00c2\u00a0agonised 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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>woman) – the centre of the universe is Stanley Gibbons<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

\"gayventure\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

“I am after unusual penny stamps, Valentine’s day covers or other unsual covers”.<\/p>\n

Immediately another assistant said: “Ah, I think you usually\u00c2\u00a0deal with me. I’ll deal with this”<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

This year I settled upon two covers including this one:<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0\"pennycover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is a letter to sent to a Lady Durham in 1845 and was sealed with red wax. I love email, but sometimes\u00c2\u00a0I miss the tiny ritual formalities that letter writing required.<\/p>\n

I hope you all had the most romantic February 14ths!<\/p>\n

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