Exploring the world

I started to explore the world from a very young age, but I didn’t travel beyond the dining room table. I wasn’t alone, not many under 10s got to travel back in the mid to late-1960s.

My exploration was via stamps collected from all over the world, and glued carefully with fiddly little tabs, into a Stanley Gibbons stamp album. It was here that I imagined travelling to exotic countries such as China, Egypt, Australia, the USA and many others.

Long before Discovery Channel and Sir David Attenborough’s wonderful documentaries, it was postage stamps that gave me and generations of young people a taste of far flung lands and a glimpse of different cultures. Armed with an atlas, I searched to find these foreign lands, imagined how to get there, and what it would be like. That curiousity about the big wide world has never died, even though the last stamps were stuck in my album in 1971, when almost overnight it became ‘uncool’ to have such a hobby. However, the travel bug remained and I still get excited when visiting foreign lands.

Of course, there were stamps from other places that I could never find in the atlas such as Magyar Posta, Helvetica and Suomi, but once explained you knew. Knowledge was power then, as it remains today.

It was with great interest to read a recent BBC article telling the story of some millennials who have once again taken up this hobby.

Not surprisingly, times have changed, so now collectors use technology to share their stamps via Instagram and WhatsApp. They also use online catalogues and forums to browse, swap, check the authenticity and sell their stamps.

I’d be very interested to hear if anyone in the village is collecting stamps, or still has their childhood collections.

See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49632306 to read the BBC article.