ABOUT ME

As a child I was a fairly avid stamp collector. I took up stamp collecting because, in the mid-'60s, petrol stations often handed out free packets of CTO stamps to their customers. My father passed them to me and encouraged me to take up collecting. Shortly afterwards, this nice old lady who lived behind us heard about my new enthusiasm for stamps and gave me the bulk of her collection, which consisted mostly of Australian, British and Empire/Commonwealth stamps, but included a smattering of issues from almost every country in the world. While she regaled me with homemade ginger beer, she taught me the fundamentals of stamp collecting and how to use Stanley Gibbons' Simplified Stamp Catalogue 1954, which I still have among my possessions today.

My passion for stamps, which by 1970 was focused on the issues from the English island of Lundy, vanished in the summer of 1970/71, when I got into rock music in a big way. My old school exercise books tell the story of the transformation in unambiguous terms: on one page of my schoolbooks I was listing the newest issues from exotic-sounding places like Tanzania, Nauru and Tristan da Cunha - on the next were crude drawings of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and scribbled declarations such as 'Led Zeppelin forever!'

Only earlier this year (2010), when I was moving house and I came across remnants of the collections of stamps the old lady had given me over 40 years ago, did my old enthusiasm flare up again. As I was overcome with a debilitating illness that left me largely housebound and in pain much of the time, stamp collecting appealed to me more and more as a means of distracting myself from the terrible onward progress of my mysterious illness.

As the year comes to an end, my affliction has faded into a distant memory, but stamps have come to preoccupy me as nothing else has done in a very long time. Collecting, as most collectors, will admit, is an addiction and today my life largely revolves large around the stamps I'm buying and selling. It all could be so easy and enjoyable - but funnily enough it isn't. This blog is a place for me to vent some of the frustrations that I, as a stamp collector, feel at the massive ineptitude of Australia Post, the 'bargain basement' mentality introduced by Ebay's predominance in the stamp market, and the very strange, and highly questionable business model brought into the world by a vicious beast called Paypal.

 I don't know who will find this blog interesting, but I guess there's always a chance that what I write will ring true to other collectors.