My second philatelic passport acquisition in a month

A couple of weeks back I blogged about a new philatelic passport, and now I'm blogging again about another one! This time it's a passport issued for an exhibition in New Zealand, way back in 1990!

These passports don't pop up on eBay very often and when they do they tend to come along in clusters. It's the fourth passport I've added to my collection in 2026 and the oldest one I've bought this year.

The opening stamp features Goldie, the cartoon kiwi mascot of the Commonwealth Games that were being held in New Zealand that year.

Whoever completed this passport included a couple of miniature sheets issued to commemorate the Games. Goldie appears again.

How old is this passport? Well, the USSR had sent their stamp bureau to exhibit. This asteroid is maybe a premonition of the extinction events that would see the Soviet Union disappear just a year or so later. 

There's always one stamp in a passport that just grabs my attention. This time its a lovely stamp from New Caledonia marking the bicentenary of the 1879 French Revolution. There's a smudge on it from the cancellation on the opposite page, but that doesn't detract too much from the stamp.

One of the things I love about these passports is that I never know exactly what stamps or postmarks I will find inside them. It feels a bit like a treasure hunt, never knowing quite what will be unearthed. 

This postmark is a hoot!

I arrived home after a week away to find an eBay purchase waiting for me - a package from Germany with another philatelic passport for my collection.

This passport was issued at the German stamp show in Nuremburg in 1999. It's not complete but it has an interesting mix of stamps from different countries and what is probably one of my favourite postmarks of all time!

Building a model railway part 2: needing a new plan B

So in a follow-up to yesterday's post I discovered last night that I had affixed the new track substantially more securely than the old track I pulled up before. I can't take it up again, so I have to live with the overly long passing loop and that the whole lay-out is skewiff with the side of the baseboard.

To add to the sense of frustration taking up the last remaining original track caused me a major panic when I inadvertently broke one of the new sets of points I had put in. Thankfully I was able to reposition the spring, but it was touch and go for a while. I also have a nagging feeling that now it's relaid it isn't as true as it was originally.

Disappointing, but a valuable learning experience.

The good news is I was able to then shift attention to a new part of the project - building a card kit of a signal box. I did this with the help / guidance / project-management of my wonderful wife Cathy, without whom I think the whole exercise would have been doomed to failure. My cutting and sticking skills are less than rudimentary.

Anyway, a few hours later (and a lot of PVA glue on my fingers), I think the finished article looks pretty good.

The kit came with the added bonus of the other two structures, seen in the photo - a lineside hut and a fuel shed. I'm pretty pleased with it / them.

The only thing that is slightly out of place with it is that it's based on a LNWR prototype, so isn't really "correct" for a West Cardiff location (GWR was generally the theme around here). I have two answers to that conundrum. Firstly, this is going to be a railway heritage centre and it's not uncommon for signal boxes to be demolished at their original site and rebuilt in a preserved railway environment. Secondly, it's my railway and I like it, and that's really what matters.

This is the first in a series of buildings I want to add to the railway. My next task is to find the 'right' engine shed that will fit the space and house two track lanes. At some point I also want to have a water tower, and some platforms. I think I have a creative way of addressing the spacing issue to get the platforms running along the long stretch of track - but more on that later.

I'm also looking into adding rolling stock. I plan to publish a full manifest for the WCRHC at some point, but I've just won a new wagon off eBay so I'm going to wait until that arrives before I start taking photos and posting them for your enjoyment.

(I know this is geeky, but I'm loving it.)

Pressure produces diamonds

Apparently. (It also breaks continental plates.)

It hasn't been an easy month or so. Cath has been ill and off work. On Tuesday the doctor told her that (and this is a paraphrase, but it's Cathy's summary) 'you're broken and I don't know how to fix you.'

Two of my friends experienced an unexpected bereavement when a pregnancy fell short.

Work hasn't been easy. Managerial caution at the highest level (some of it justifiable) has pushed one of my already-fragile colleagues almost over the edge. I have my own issues with another person who seems to have a fantastic knack for making easy jobs much, much harder than they should be, and a definite talent for creating work for other people. Unfortunately I am other people.

I still get surprised by reminders of Grandad when I least expect it. Occasionally I am ambushed by grief.

But there have been some good things shining through like sun rays in a cloudy sky.

Last week on my birthday I saw all three members of my immediate family. And it was sunny, so we went to Rest Bay and breathed in sea air and saw starfish in the rock pools.

The dodgy bit of our roof is finally - after months of stress - fixed!

Along with all the other staff I got given a Cadbury's Creme Egg in work from our CEO for Easter. Sometimes it's the littlest gestures that mean the most.

I am now working on helping with two more books. I may be involved in four books getting published this year now.

My eBay purchase of a box of 100 Padres baseball cards arrived, and I've been geekily cataloguing them. Happy Excel Spreadsheet fun!

Well first they slice the bat real thin...

I've recently been buying Padres baseball cards on eBay and the other day I bought this Fleer 'Bat's Incredible' card featuring a piece of genuine game-used bat, as swung by Phil Nevin, onetime third baseman for the Padres.



The card is in A1 condition, but it's weird to think they bought a bat and cut it up to put slivers of wood into a trading card. It's 'authentic game-used memorabilia' but it's nowhere near the same as having a jersey you could wear, or your own bat you could play with.

I was quite impressed with one of the competitions at the ice hockey the other night where you could literally "Win the shirt off their back" - the winner could ask for his favourite player's game worn jersey and it was presented to him/her out on the ice at the end of the match. Now that's memorabilia.

Anyway, I'm quite pleased with the card, especially as Phil Nevin was actually playing for the Padres when we saw them take on the Giants in 2005. That makes the whole 'collectible for collectability's sake' thing a little more personal to me.

Just as good the second time around

Went to see Transformers again tonight - on another free ticket. I was expecting 'second screening syndrome' where you see the continuity gaps, spot wider plot holes etc. I'm happy to say the film went even more quickly and I was carried along with it. This is also one of the few films where the score would probably be worth buying - I really noticed the heroic music pumping at key points in the film.

The only problem now is my car doesn't seem as cool any more. Cathy chided me the other day when I said that, pointing out my alloyed up Golf is still a nice car. But it's not a robot. Sigh.

If you haven't hocked your first born yet to buy a ticket, you'll have to wait til the general release on Friday. Still, gives you a couple of days to get some bids on the kids on eBay.

I'm in Four Four Two - not that you'd know

A while back my brother and his fanzine compatriots "bought" the loyalty of a disgruntled Aresnal fan who had invited bids for his support on eBay*. And now there's a picture of the 'new Shrew' on page 58 of the December issue of Four Four Two.

I'd been talking to Dave moments before the picture was taken, and so just above 'new Shrew's' shoulder, there's me - and if you know where to look my dad's in the shot too! Dave gets 3 mentions in the article, which is almost as good as my credit in the front of the When Saturday Comes Half Decent Football Book. (I wrote the bit on the mighty Shrewsbury)

* How this worked - this chap, Steve Brown, was sick of all the Ashley Cole transfer nonsense and the move to the new stadium and whatnot so he put his club loyalty up for bids on eBay. For the princely sum of £102.63 Dave and co 'bought' him and have spent the "transfer fee" on a shirt and scarf for him, plus his entry into a couple of games. Yes, I know it's strange.

The hoodoo continues

2 years ago, on Shrewsbury Town's first game back in the league, they lost at home to Lincoln 1-0. Last year they lost to Lincoln 1-0. This year... yeah well. These things apparently come in threes.

The annoying thing is that the boys in Blue and Amber played pretty well for most of the match. In particular, strikers Derek Asamoah (ironically ex-Lincoln) and Andy Cooke both looked useful. The team played some attractive football and missed a penalty as well as a couple of other gilt-edged chances, all the while looking a real possible threat. But after Lincoln scored a sucker punch goal against the run of play, then got ten men behind the ball at every opportunity, they won it with a solid lesson in how to defend a 1-0 lead.

Of course, they were helped by a twelfth man: Mark Haywood, a ref who was so absolutely poor at spotting Lincoln's persistent fouling that he may as well have been wearing a red and black shirt. He missed a clear professonal foul on Asamoah in the first half, and, again in the first half awarded a penalty against the Lincoln 'keeper for deliberately bringing down a Town player, but mystifyingly didn't even book the goalie.

Added to that several blatantly wrong decisions (including awarding one of the most obvious Town throw-ins ever to Lincoln) left me convinced that he's banging a bird from Lincoln and was hoping for some decent head that night. Either that or the LCFC team bus was travelling home via Yorkshire to drop him off. (Although in the interest of fairness, he did apparently admit to Town boss Gray Peters that he made a mistake when Asamoah got brutally scythed down. Like that's a lot of help! You have to make the call at the time, not with hindsight. Any idiot can do that!)

On the plus side it was nice and sunny and I got to sit next to me Dad, which made it feel like a proper day out. The last time it was just us sitting together was watching Clachnacuddin beat Elgin in the Inverness Cup. The score then was 1-0 as well.

Hurrah for football

118 years ago today, on 8 September 1888, the first ever season of the football league kicked off.

And, if all goes according to plan, on Saturday I'll be seeing the mighty Shrews take on the Lincolnshire scummers who beat us last year. Hopefully, Town will do the business and this bloke who used to play for us won't get a look in.

Usually I've seen a game by this stage of the season, so I'm really looking forward to the match. I also want to meet the Arsenal fan that my brother and his comrades bought off eBay and who will be at his first Town game on Saturday.

With this weekend and also having a ticket to see Wales take on the might of Cyprus in October, it looks like my season of spectating at football matches is finally starting.

Therapeutic Philately

It’s kind of an open secret that back towards the end of last year I wasn’t feeling too good. I took six weeks off work and started on some medication. Which meant that earlier this year I celebrated my 30th birthday feeling like a bit of a cliché: a writer on Prozac. How original.

One of the things that helped me get my head straight was rediscovering philately – stamp collecting to those who have an aversion to fancy words. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the most reproduced image ever in history is the portrait of the Queen by Arnold Machin that appears on UK definitive stamps. People often call them ‘Queen’s head’ stamps, but their technical term is Machin definitives. I spent a number of hours sorting through boxes and bags of stamps and compiled all my Queen’s head stamps into the right order in a large album – making sure my Machins matched.

Cheap therapy
The thing about stamp collecting is that it requires a lot of concentration, but isn’t actually very important in the long run. It’s time-consuming, but if you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world. And therein lay the secret of why it was so good for me – at a time when my head was running with itself in terms of crazy thoughts, something so mundane could keep me enthralled and prevent me from stressing out.

I’ve kind of kept up with it this past year. Recently through a couple of chance finds I’ve become quite interested in stamps from the South African colonies before the Unification of South Africa in 1910. Considering these small bits of paper are up to and over 100 years old, they’re quite easy to find and, best of all, cheap. The other day I noticed the following stamp for sale on eBay, hard-to-find and consequently not cheap.



Head’s up
I just love this stamp. I didn’t bother bidding for it because it was pricey. But it makes me laugh, because it goes to show that we are all human. 

I don’t know if anyone showed King Edward VII, who was a keen philatelist and took a personal interest in designing the Royal Mail’s stamps, but if they did, I wonder what he thought of it?

Errors are big business in stamp-collecting. Mainly this is because they’re rare. When an error is discovered, the remaining stock is usually destroyed. They don’t tend to happen so much nowadays, anyway, because of the computerised printers that are used (although some Machins got printed a couple, of years ago without £ signs on). This kind of error is possible because the plates were assembled by hand, and each section of the stamp was printed seperately.

My point – and I do have one
It would be interesting to know what happened to the hapless printer (let’s call him Bob) who loaded the central image the wrong way up on this stamp. I can imagine Bob came in for some flak – maybe he was ‘investigated’ by his managers. You can bet Bob’s mates would have ribbed him mercilessly: "Hey Bob, you on the printer today? Don’t forget to put the King’s head in the right way up! Har har har!"

But the irony is that Bob’s cock up is now worth quite a bit, whereas all the printers who paid attention and never screwed up produced stamps that are worth only pennies now.

I don’t want to spoil this story by drawing a lesson from it, but it’s worth adding that I sent out a press release yesterday about an event that’s coming up. It was a beautiful press release – the headline was great, the quotes were great, it ran together nicely, it was concise and to the point.

The only thing I forgot to tell people about was the date.