In my youth I was a keen stamp collector. I think I inherited many but am not sure where from. I still have my album in the study but haven't looked at it for many years but writing this has interested me in revisiting it.
I do remember a strange way of buying stamps when I was a boy. Every few months I would receive a book of stamps from around the world, all individually priced. I seem to remember they came from Bridgenorth and were probably from the Stanley Gibbons organisation.
You would take the stamps you wanted to buy and then send them the money. There must have been bags of trust on both sides. I remember my grandfather often bought stamps for me. Stupidly all too often I didn't use stamp hinges but stuck the stamps in which is really a no no.
Then at secondary school I was secretary of the Philately Society where boys swapped stamps and looked admiringly at the collections of others.
My favourite stamps due to their historic value are German depicting Hitler. Most of them are overstamped with new values - some times in their millions as hyper inflation took hold in the country.
We have only experienced hyper inflation once in our lives and that was on a holiday to the former Yugoslavia many years ago. We were told to take British sterling or American Dollars with us and to only exchange small amounts at a time due to the currency being devalued virtually by the hour. The result of this was in the evenings buying a drink ended with us receiving a fistful of currency that by the next day would be pretty worthless anyway. The problem was deciding how much money would last us for the day as prices were continually rising. It was a very strange situation. We were literally exchanging money by the hour. If we needed to go on a coach trip we exchanged money just for that trip, knowing that the following day it would be more than twice the price.
Tomorrow I'm going to return to the thorny subject of panic attacks and burnout as the response I received from my previous blog on the subject warranted further discussion. It's important to me in all these things to realise that if you are struggling in any way, you aren't alone.
You can walk past hundreds of people without knowing what is trapped inside them. Last week when I was being subjected to abuse through the scam that I have outlined I walked through Norwich in an absolute daze. Everyone else seemed to be going about their business whilst all I could think about was the question of whether I was being scammed or not and whether my money was safe. But having said that I bet there were other people passing who had their own fears, their own doubts and their own problems, most of them trying desperately to hid a hurt that was burning inside of them.