It’s my dear friend’s birthday this weekend and I need to post her card. I wasn’t sure of the current price to send a card to Europe but my hero googled and found it’s 87p.
Time to get out the stamp box. It’s a smart crystal glass box, given to us a few years ago as a Christmas gift by the company chairman, who was an MP. It’s a bit battered and cracked here and there, but we’ve always kept our stamps in it, so in spite of the sharp edges, that’s what we continue to do.
Would we be able to make up 87p from the odds and ends that are inside? I’ve always admired the skill of the assistants in the post office, who can juggle all the combinations of stamps to create the correct postage in an instant, but expect that’s a declining skill now they simply print a sticker.
But look what I found when sifting through the stamps! A very valuable 2p stamp, created long ago by a small boy who knew exactly where it should be kept. I love coming across things like that, so sweet! Quite how long it’s been there, who knows?
Of course, having retrieved the 87p’s worth of postage (two 20p and one 47p stamp…how lucky was that?!) I carefully returned the precious 2p stamp to the bottom of the box for another day.
