My Postboy
album arrived at Christmas
inscribed
with good wishes from my Dad.
It smelt of crisp
new binding:
twenty
stamps from Mauritius and the UK
were hinged
neatly, setting a precedent.
Places with
exotic names
made me
wonder as a devout eight-year-old,
how
countries in deepest Africa
could be so
poor and in need of the gospel
and yet
produce such splendid stamps?
Decades
later my high school
invited me
back to speak
to students
of the day
about my
hobby.
My first
PowerPoint was titled ‘Philately’
and an acne
smartass in the front row
asked if
this was the name
of a
transgender person,
setting the
hormone-saturated group
of twenty
laughing.
I wouldn’t
want to be a philatelist
in this post-Postboy
age
of on-line purchasing,
delivery by drone,
where computers
generate sticky labels instead.
My album sleeps
– a cat on a shelf – relegated
to the museum
alongside Model T Fords,
teapots, the
fax, and courtesy.
