Post

Look what I got in the post today! I never admitted it but I used to collect stamps when I was a kid; only the pretty ones of course, but I was fascinated by these tiny little works of art with their frilly edges and unusual language and currency. They made our own British ones look kind of dull in comparison.

The other day, my mum had seen on TV a girl pulling apart a cocktail umbrella which instantly brought back a childhood memory of finding and unwrapping a cocktail umbrella. Inside she found a tiny rolled up scrap of chinese newspaper in the middle and thinking how exotic and beautiful the writing had seemed to her, a mundane thing like newspaper from the other side of the world. Looking through these stamps she sent me today I too was instantly transported to my childhood, back to the scruffy little stamp shop my brother and I used to visit on a Saturday with our bits of pocket money, scanning the little glassine bags that were attached to the walls. I can remember the smell of the paper, the filtered light coming through the dirty windows, the old man sitting behind the desk. The excitement of finding a packet of stamps that caught my magpie eyes and knowing I had enough money. Going home and rearranging my album to fit them in. Sad I know but in the noisy techno-bound lives we live in today we forget to appreciate these trivial things. I wonder if my two button-pressing-mad angels will remember their childhood with such nostalgia at simple pleasures or whether it will go in such a computer aided blur they miss what's going on around them.

I'm glad I kept my album as I found a use for some of the more ordinary ones in my collages, which is where these newly sent ones will probably end up too, but now I am thinking I should show my boy, remind him there is a real world out there with ordinary people using stamps like these and reading newspapers we don't understand!

Oh yes, and I got some umbrellas too ;0)