stamps and more stamps.....in the UK

Hello, what a wonderful day. I just spent a few hours with Roy Simpson from the IPDA, up in his part of the woods near Birmingham. You will know Roy as Machin Man ( Machins Made Easy), the articles he has written for me, and his web site on machins - see my links if you have not been to his site.

Apart from being a great source of Machin information and stamps he is a great guy - as I always expected he would be.

He took me to his local stamp dealer. We spent an hour or so browsing though box after box of covers and stamps. How fast does time go when you are doing that sort of rummaging through thousands of stamps. I have some pictures which I will get uploaded on my return to Sydney.

Needless to say I managed to pick up some covers which I think will make some nice give aways, so keep reading and you might find something of interest coming up soon.

After the stamp dealers we were thirsty, so we retreated to a little old pub in the country. A few jars of fine English ale were consumed over chat about stamps. Roy had brought along two cases of material for me to look at. More conversation about stamps and a few extra stamps that Roy has donated to my competitions.

One of Roy's gifts was a few copies of the 10p Royal Mail booklet of machins; the Farm buildings series - this one is the Wales farm house with 2 by 1/2p, 2 by 1p and 1 by 7p Machins inside, and, 1/2p with a phosphor band shift to the left. Nice addition to your collection I am sure.

Roy also gave me a small magazine about British Stamp Printers. Very interesting. To win the booklet send me an email to cddstamps@gmail.com and tell me how many British Security Stamp printers there have been since 1840. I'll tell you there are only two left today. Tomorrow some more detaials about these printers. I will give away 6 booklets, so first 6 entries win.

One final piece of News... Roy and I also put all the names of the people who joined our IPDA stamp chat marathon into a hat, and made the official draw for the winner of the door prize.

And the winner was, "ones", John Johnson from New Jersey USA. Congratulations if you are reading. Roy will get the prize, a lovely used copy of SG 512 ( I wrote about this some weeks ago) in the mail to you.

Hope you are enjoying your stamps.... Michael