Stamp collecting

Talking with a friend the other day lead to talking about their interest in the design of postage stamps, not that they were a collector of those things and that was inspiration enough for this post.

That strip of stamps came recently on a compact disc I had bough from a guy in Poland, Europe which caught my eye as most mail today commercially doesn't have stamps on but instead is put in a machine that marks you have paid the mailing fees for it and often things from other countries around the world are interesting.

Stamps generally come in two forms, those which are  fairly plain in appearance with fixed designs on them such as the British 'definitive' ones with the Queen's head  that have a long period in production and other more decorative  ones that commemorate events or show things such as historic events, buildings, transportation, nature and seasonal events such as Christmas. 

I started a collection when I was ten years old starting with inherited stamp albums of the hard back book design with fixed pages per country some of which went back to the mid nineteenth century when it came to British Stamps including a complete unused set of the present Queen's Coronation issued stamps.

It wasn't long getting into my mid teens that I moved into the loose-leaf binder kind of stamp album so I could set the pages out as I wished, making better use to present them in a more attractive way only feature entries by theme and countries I wanted.

Around this period, I used by buy mixed bags of stamps from my local store and visit a specialist dealer from time to time buying direct from him specific issues I wanted in my collection.

To aid with this I would borrow the Stanley Gibbon's guidebook that listed all World-wide stamps and make notes in a pocket book of those that interested me.

Around this time I collected religiously British "First Day Covers" that were a stiff card envelope with all of a commemorative set of stamps on that would by stamped with a special first day of issue stamp and later on Presentation Packs that had the stamps pre-mounted in a presentation.

Our train set

One of the biggest dreams a child has as they start to get older is to have a train layout of his or her very own with a proper electric controller, a good length of track and some scenery which the boy pictured has in the form of a picture to the side of his layout.

They will slowly acquire a selection of locomotives and rolling stock which he has a place to store them when not in use and maybe might build some kits of buildings plus make trees to go on their layout.

Mine was in the loft.  

Although I was raised as a boy, their was no reason as a gurl not to have one as girls do have trainsets today and as a sissy I just love steam trains and engines as much as boys and girls.

Sometimes two interests combine into one topic and that is very much what we have here as Andy and I were keen Stamp Collectors who like the thematic issues issued by Royal Mail at the time.

I also love trains and the big news in 1975 was the Advanced Passenger Train which promised to reduce journey times

Naturally every new train had boys and men wanting models to run on our model railways so manufacturers produced scaled replicas for us.

Sadly that service introduced locally being a major rail hub and a centre at the time for producing engines met more than its fair share of teething problems and was cancelled by the mid 1980's.

Tammy is a gurl who loves hur trains.