A Philatelist’s lament … What might have been

Occasionally happenings arise in life where, had things been different, the outcome would have been so much better. They tend to stick in ones mind permanently with the recurring thought ‘If only….’ when ones memory is jogged by something.

When this applies to something of personal interest, ones hobby, for example, the memories are even more difficult to erase.

Two such recollections plague me regularly. A long-standing friend had been going through some of the effects of his one hundred year old mother and asked if he could discuss something with me. He duly arrived with a big envelope. It proved to contain a large number of Victorian stamps, all on piece, mostly penny stars, plate numbers, lilacs and venetian reds, with a wide variety of postmarks. Poring over these, I’d almost forgotten my friend’s presence and muttered, more or less to myself, ‘If only these had been on cover!’ I heard a deep sigh and looked-up at a very glum Clive. ‘I cut them all off’, he said.

The other memory more relevant to me personally, arose when, as part of a charity party, I was sorting through a vast pile of donated material. As usual, most of this was GB definitives, but peeping out, I saw an Iceland 1Krona stamp with what looked like an overprint. Although I didn’t shout ‘Eureka!’ there was a very definite surge of adrenalin. But when I pulled it out, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was, or had been, a picture postcard of Graf Zeppelin with a second 30aur stamp on it as well, both overprinted ‘Zeppelin,1931’ but the well-meaning donor had cut the postcard in half! The picture luckily, if you can call it that, the off cut, had one third of LZ127, half of the Iceland Tour green cachet of a Viking longboat, a green ‘Mit Luftschiff’ legend, but no ‘Graf Zeppelin’, three quarters of a Reykjavik registered label and just a small arc of the Friedrichshaven receiving CDS with the letters ‘EN’. But it still has a welcome place in my collection. But as Omar Khayyam said much more eloquently, ‘You can’t turn the clock back!’ Anon

Editor: I think most members will be able to guess the origin of the above piece.