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Sunday 30 April 2017

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.

5 comments:

  1. Lol I won't offer to send him one then. I collect postcards. I don't have as many as your Mum nor am I as organised though I would like to do something with them. I'm hoping to incorporate them into my scrapbooking - when I get around to that lol. I still have some from when I was kid. I pick at least one or two up wherever we go (as well as magnets!). Last year while we were at an antiques show here in Michigan I actually found some of Harwich in England where my Nana was from. I got talking to the lady who owned the stall and funny enough her family was actually from England, right by where I'm from!

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  2. I too collected postcards and had them from all over the world. Not as many as 60,000, just a few hundred and I had them in albums. I decluttered them when we moved into our last house as we were downsizing and they took up room. Nowadays the only postcards I collect are the ones with maps of the area on.
    In my time I have collected bookmarks, maps and stamps too, but not anymore.

    Joan (Wales)

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  3. Can't wait to see the blanket when it's done.

    60,000....wow that is a lot of postcards-x-

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  4. Make it a rule that he can only collect postcards from places when he visits, lol, that may curtail the quantity.

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  5. Oh, my! That's quite a collection of postcards your mother had! You could put together a nice little starter kit for bear - a dozen or so assorted postcards, one of those photo storage boxes in which to store them, and an atlas, perhaps.

    My father collected stamps and he started stamp albums for all the children. I lost the album he started for me, but my mother bought me another album. I spent hours collecting and fixing stamps to the albums and it brought me a lot of pleasure, but eventually, I lost interest. Last year, I gave away the collection to a friend's husband. Now I have to decide what to do with my coin collection!

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