Let me lick you up and down (‘til you say stop).
Savour the sensation of my soft, silky hands gently caressing your perforated edges. Ohhh, so very, very perforated…
Let me mount you firmly, pressing you into my crisp white sheet, perfectly placed, not a corner out of line.
No stress, honey - I always handle with care. I learned the importance of proper alignment early on; nothing worse than a wonky mount.
Fine, I’ll confess: I’m actually talking about stamps. Postage stamps. Stamp collecting. Philately.
This was not a requested topic.
Perhaps I should’ve titled this Return to Sender: (My Reputation After This Post!)
If you’re new here, you’re probably thinking I’ve lost the plot. If you’re no stranger to the Gemma Rose experience, you’ll know this is just par for the course.
I have a stamp collection, and I pulled out my album this afternoon for the first time in years!
Although it’s no big secret, it just never comes up, especially not in a Gemma Rose session, for fairly obvious reasons. Turning you on is the name of the game, and surely nothing would kill the mood faster than me whispering, while I’m on top of you, “By the way, did you know I used to be a member of the Philatelic Youth Council?”
There’s no grand story behind how I got into stamp collecting. I was six years old when Nan gave me a little starter kit: a stamp album, stamps, a magnifying glass, a perforation gauge, and a packet of hinges (or “mounts,” hehe).
Naturally, I ignored the hinges entirely and went straight for the sellotape. At six years old, I was a philatelic philistine; blissfully unaware that I was committing a cardinal sin of stamp collecting.
Proud of my work, I marched up to Mum to show her my first completed page. She was horrified. The offending page with the sellotaped stamps was removed. Within days, she bought me new stamps and made sure I knew exactly how to use those hinges. Lesson well and truly learned: sellotape and stamp collecting do not mix.
For the first few years I collected all kinds of stamps. One afternoon I was playing at a friends house, and we were going through a huge pile of stamps her father had in an empty icecream container. When she wasn’t looking I stuffed a handful into the pocket of my pinafore. Next minute my friend, Emma, had a grand idea: “Let’s roll down the stairs!”
As we rolled down the stairs the stamps fell out of my pocket.
I joined a club run by NZ Post called the Stamp Hunters Club. Each month you’d receive a newsletter and a handful of stamps. I also became a member of the Philatelic Youth Council, who issued me with a shiny little “PYC” badge upon joining, and sent me quarterly newsletters.
Around age nine I decided to shake things up a bit by becoming a thematic stamp collector - collecting stamps based on a specific subject or theme, rather than focusing on a country or time period. My focus was on animals: domestic, farm, woodland, exotic, prehistoric. If it had fur, feathers, or fangs, I wanted it on a stamp. My album began to look like Noah’s Ark!
Fast forward to my early teens and through a stamp collecting club on Yahoo!, I had gotten to know a prolific stamp collector in England. He was very much a mover and a shaker in the philatelic world. A power player, if you will.
He was also a Beatles fan, and a retired maths teacher. I know it sounds super dodgy, but nothing untoward went on. Every so often he’d send me British stamps and I'd send him some New Zealand stamps in return. The bulk of my collection from my teens came from him.
One of my greatest boasts at the time was a limited-edition set of Paul McCartney’s “Happy Memories from the Isle of Man” stamps - designed by Paul himself, no less.
When I looked at them again this afternoon, for the first time in years, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “Fuck‘s sake, Paul. Doodled some flowers, slapped your name on it and called it a day?” Gotta love Paul.
These days I’m not an active collector, but the affection’s still there. Turning those album pages today was such a lovely little trip down memory lane!
My stamp album might stay closed most of the time now, but like me, it’s full of lovely things worth revisiting…if you ask nicely. Philately will get you everywhere. (see what I did there?)
And now for a mini-tour through my stamp album. These are just a few pages out of many!
