Absurdia.Net

As a nerd kid, I got caught in the vicious circle of stamps collecting. It all began one winter evening when passing in front of a philatelist’s shop I saw them. It was a wonderful sight. It was a set of five or six – I do not remember right now – stamps portraying arlequins and fairies and other masked wonders. They were so beautiful. I started gazing at those stamps in the shop’s window everyday. Till my parents agreed to buy them. Oh, happiness! To own something so precious! It was one of the best presents ever. Many other stamps came after that. I decided to only collect British stamps after careful inspection of specialized catalogues. They looked particularly nice and anyway, I was suggested to have a themed collection. Christmas specials were the ones I liked the most. They were so fancy and full of details printed in silver and gold. But I wasn’t a real stamps nerd after all. I liked stamps not for the stamps in themselves, but for the colorful miniature illustration feel they offered to the eye. They were like tiny windows opened on magical universes. Other aspects of the collecting hobby didn’t interest me at all. I wasn’t a serious collector. The old philatelist selling stamps to me though had a different opinion about my collection. Yes, he had an opinion, as the collection was his. Once I had bought all the prettier series in the British catalogue – the christmasy or the fantasy ones or the ones about animals and nature – he started requesting I enlarged my views. So I did it, also because my parents at that point were directing me and I could not object. And I started getting other stuff, the celebrative series with inventors’ or literates’ faces, with atoms and crazy scientific subjects, the ones about architectural wonders and other cultural themes on them. They weren’t bad, only not as good as the others. They were still in the realm of what can be looked at with relative interest by any kid. But those also were not available in infinite numbers. I ran out of those as well. At that point, the old man started selling me Queen’s profiles, in all colors and values. Dozens of stamps with the Queen’s face on them. How boring. That’s when I lost my interest in stamps. Collecting wasn’t anymore fun, it was a work and I didn’t like to invest my weekly allowance on something so boring and mature. I liked too many things to waste money on that. In brief: my collection is incomplete. I’m willing to sell it. I can’t bring it with me forever. It’s a burden, of the kind you’re afraid to damage all the time without knowing why the idea of damaging it is so frightening. I went to the same shop I used to go when I was a kid to buy stamps hoping the old man would take them back for a fair price. But the old philatelist wasn’t there anymore, of course. There was a younger man, who barricaded himself inside the shop and wouldn’t open the door. After a twenty minutes wait in the cold outside the damned shop – I banged and tapped on the door to attract the man’s attention with no success – I went away. What’s a man who’s supposed to sell something, even if it’s stamps, doing in a shop where no one can enter? I wonder. I don’t know what to do with those stamps. But serves me right. I was the first to be a neglectful philatelist in the first place. The moral of the story – perhaps – is: never let your children have hobbies they’re not so serious about. It’s for their own sake. And for your money’s sake too.