What Stamps Mean To Me.

Stamps as Escape

Between the ages of 11–16, I went to boarding school. The school was about 4 hours away from the city of Lagos where I grew up. My parents had the great idea that I would ‘truly grow up’ in a place far from home. The school was an hour from my Dad’s village of birth, a place we visited regularly, but was far from everything I’d experienced up until the day I got there. I wasn’t prepared for the harshness of the environment I was thrust into. There were~120 other eleven year olds who had come from every one of the 30 other states in the country and we were all scared. At least I was.

Whenever I recount some of those boarding school experiences to my wife, who grew up in Dallas Texas, she wonders how I ‘managed to survive Hunger Games’. An anecdote: My parents dropped me late in the evening on my first day. Because it was late I didn’t get assigned a locker. We ended up putting all my luggage right beside my bed. I fell asleep, tired after a long drive and sad because I was missing my family, and woke up the next morning with all my luggage gone. Crying, I went outside and saw my stuff strewn all over the common area. Welcome to boarding school.

To escape, I was always either reading a book or dreaming of faraway places. Something else that helped me escape? Stamps. Stamps were a bigger part of escape for me. I seriously got into stamps from commonwealth countries. So I nurtured penpals in other countries colonized by the British, Jamaica, Australia etc. I also had an uncle who was studying medicine in Russia and he sent me my collection of Russian stamps. It was my Russian stamp collection that caught the attention of KA.

Stamp: M.Petipa, choreographer. Ballet "Paquita" (Russia) (Russian ballet) Mi:RU 283,Sn:RU 6126

Stamp: M.Petipa, choreographer. Ballet "Paquita" (Russia) (Russian ballet) Mi:RU 283,Sn:RU 6126. Buy, sell, trade and…

colnect.com

KA was a kid who’d had a nice sheltered upbringing and, with buck teeth more pronounced than mine, he got picked on regularly. LO was the only other person who’d scored above 90 in a 100-score test on Combinations and Permutations, I was the other, and for that she had few friends and I was one of them. TO was our age but was a couple of years ahead of us, he’d skipped a few classes, and also had very few friends. Since we all couldn’t join many other clubs in school, and had a shared love for the promise of faraway places that stamps provided, we decided to form the philately club.

We met every Wednesday and talked about our stamp collections, penpals in faraway places who sent us letters and when we’d finally get of out of our own version of Panem. We all yearned for the Penny Black stamp knowing we’d never get it and wondered whether the Inverted Jenny was intentionally upside down. We shared a bond that I’d forgotten was key to surviving the years in that boarding school…we escaped together.

Stamps as Message

By USPS (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Stamps are tangible links to the past and the study of stamps, philately, is also the study of history. The condition of a stamp, its rarity, the size of its borders, any variations to the original form of the stamp and any errors in the stamp all give a sense for the value of the stamp. An interesting quirk of stamp collecting is that, while unused stamps are generally more valuable than used ones, if a stamp was used in the period in which it was issued the value goes up. The fun is in determining which stamps are ‘in period’. I encouraged my penpals to send me ‘in period’ stamps back then. Preferably used.

https://www.royalmail.com/gameofthronesstamps?iid=PROMO_H1_GOT

Commemorative stamps, while artistic, are meant to celebrate things that are a source of pride for that nation at a point in time. These expressions of pride or value, viewed in a different time, might become shameful. For example stamps commemorating wars, Unlike currency, which doesn’t change very often, a nation can express itself more frequently through stamps and nations tend to this more often than most people realize. But the stamp collection purists frown at commemorative stamps. Especially when pop culture, like Game of Thrones, determines who/what goes on a stamp. I personally think, like the covers of magazines and the themes in movies, stamps reflect who we are…

Stamps. In State.

Without knowing about my stamp collecting habit/philatelic ways, PS posted the ‘Celebrate the Century’ commemorative stamps which she’d found while cleaning out her house in Boston over the 2017 holiday period. She’d found some books and the stamps she’d bought in 1999 and thought my sons would love them for the history lessons they held about the great American century.

Turns out I’m more into the stamps than my sons will probably be ever be. My stamp collections are in an album in my parents’ home in Lagos. Stored well and pristine under the transparent pvc album material. I’ll give the original collection, and all the stamps I’ve collected since then, to my sons. I hope they get it but they probably won’t.

Because we send emails now. And my sons will probably find their escape through Augmented and Virtual Reality experiences. And when my sons are sad or tired they’ll probably just retreat to their alternate realities, which might actually be their main realities. They won’t need any stamps there. Not even the commemorative ‘Snowy Day’ ones I bought because I read them the book.

https://medium.com/@seyi_fab/stamps-and-states-ce7b5912bfda