Darn it to Heck - Again

I'm 49 rows into the blanket but have to take breaks because the needles feel so clumsy.  Also it is something you can do while listening to something, but you have to keep an eye on the three strands or bits get missed.  I may be away some time.

While I am here, I will update you on bear's latest.  Bless was kind enough to comment and mentioned that my great aunt was a character.  There was a lot of that in my family, which means that I have plenty of stories to tell bear.  As bear was enjoying poring over the maps and talking about different places, I told him about my mother's main hobby.  She collected postcards.  She would coax everyone to send her a postcard back from wherever they went, had a selection from her grandfather and great uncle who were sea captains, her uncle who was in the Royal Navy, her brother in the merchant navy and browsed the second hand shops and postcard fairs.  For most of her life she would get one or two postcards here and there, but just before she died she got a shoe box with 800 postcards from a dealer and spent a lot of time happily sorting through them.

Mother had an organised mind.  She sorted all her postcards into scrapbooks, divided into countries.  If she had a lot of a particular country she would sort those postcards by the appropriate divisons, so the French cards were sorted by Department, postcards from the USA would be sorted by state and then county, etc.  She would spend hours studying old atlases and gazetteers to try and identify a troublesome card.  Some of the cards she had were quite old and places have changed their names, like the city once known as Danzig is now called Gdansk so she could spend hours getting the postcard in exactly the right album with real triumph when an awkward one was finally placed.  When Yugoslavia split she carefully got out the scrapbooks and spent hours sorting the postcards into their correct country.  She got enormous pleasure from this.

Bear said he would like to collect postcards, it sounded fun.  NOBODY SEND HIM POSTCARDS!  When my mother died she had, at a very conservative estimate, 60,000 postcards, that's sixty thousand, it's not a typo.  They took bookcase after bookcase and shelf after shelf.  They were stacked in piles.  They were a dust trap and a fire hazard.  My poor brother had to deal with them.  Mounds and mounds of bits of rectangular paper all worth something but usually less than 5p.  It was a nightmare that I was grateful not to have.

I have told bear that if we go out we can perhaps pick out one or two postcards when are there.  So we could pick up one at a time if we are still in our home town but if we are farther away perhaps we can pick up three or four.  It may encourage bear to move further than the end of our street.  Unfortunately bear is savvy enough to know that you can buy bundles of postcards on eBay for what appear to be reasonable prices.  I have vetoed that until he has shown he can stick with this.  He almost very nearly tidied his bedroom to have places to put the postcards but I am holding firm.  Still, at least it means I can have something to give him for Christmas if he gets into it.