What Have Stamps Done For You?

The 1st and most important thing is they gave me a life again!

Always Happy Stamping! KGV.

Stamps have given me years of enjoyment, now I want to start my own stamp business. I enjoy postal history to, the old hand written letters. There are many amazing collectors stamps around to nowdays. Can never get enough of collecting stamps!

Well where do I start.

I think first it gave me all the wonderful friends I have here.

Being a borderline obsessive gardener, I use to find the winters long. Not anymore, they are not long enough.

I have found an entire new set of friends in the stamp club I belong to.

I know there is lots more but I should get back to work.

Yikes! Cost me time and money!

But gave me hours of pleasure!:-)

(Also taught me quite a lot about the world)

And provided a welcome reprise from the pressures of day to day life.

Stamps give me an identity...i am a Stamp Collector...between the internet and stamps I have made friends in the U.S. and Canada..they have stayed at my home and I have stayed at theirs..complete trust in one another because we are stamp collectors..isn't it amazing ?

I don't know where to begin answering that question.

All I can say is that I never looked back starting this hobby. It has brought years and years of pleasure for me.

Chimo

Bujutsu

Compulsive behavior, obsession and delight.

Ram

Time to myself and relaxation. Conversations with the most wonderful and intellectual people I have yet to "meet" in person but can enjoy good friends and conversation on the net. Gives me something to focus on other than the day-to-day hub-bub. Thank you SCF and thank you stamps!

made me poorer

I was born in Rehovot, a town of 60,000 people 25 Km. South of Tel-Aviv. My mother was born 35 years beforehand in the same town when it had less than 8,000 people and both my grandparents arrived there when it was merely a small and fragile settlement in the middle of no-where 11 years before my mum was born.

My mother had many stories about the British Soldiers patrolling the town when she was a child (Israel at that time was called Palestine and was a British Mandate). She also used to recall the Australian soldiers with great affection.

It seems the children of the town were waiting for the Aussies to get drunk as they were happily getting out to the street and through the coins they had in their pockets up to the air for the children to catch.

At that time most of town's children lived in conditions we would define today as horrible poverty. The Aussies' drinking habits and cheerful mood created those rare instances in which my mother had a fare chance to eat ice-cream.

And now to stamps. Back in the seventies I started (as a teenager) to swap stamps with an older Australian gentleman. He was very nice and always wrote in length. In one of his letters he wrote that he thinks he knows my hometown in person, because as far as he remembered he served their during the second world war.

I was always wondering if by any chance he was directly involved in those drinking fests. Maybe through stamp collecting I found the person that his pocket change revealed at one point of time the magical taste of ice-cream to my mother.

So stamp collecting is a wonderful thing and it will always have a chocolate-Vanilla taste for me.

Avi, that was beautiful.

Stamps,
What have they given me,
Quite a lot as you will see,
I made great friends, I spent some money,
My wife she said, it wasn't funny,
To buy that perforated stuff,
While eating crumbs and living rough,
But all the time I learned and studied,
A philatelic mind, not muddied,
I had fun on the Internet,
The perfect place for stamps, and yet,
To go to shows and Fairs was better,
Than ordering your fix, by letter,
Yes, all these things it made for me,
A lifetime hobby it shall be,
And if I'm dead, before I'm done,
Tell my wife I had such fun,
With guys and gals of high decorum,
On this great Stamp Collecting Forum.

Londonbus1

BRAVO Mr. Bus!

put the "poet" in the tower !!

Thank you very much for sharing Seahorse.

with Londonbus! Beautiful!

Thanks to all for sharing as well! Amazing.