The March meeting of the club was this week. A bloke from one of UK’s philatelic auction houses came and talked about his experiences there. And it was quite interesting – lots of slides of rarities and errors. He told us that a newly widowed lady rang to ask if they might be interested in her husband’s collection, said no need to make a special journey to look at it, she’d post it to them. And yes, you guessed it – the parcel duly arrived, the collection had a cat value of £1.2m, and at auction fetched a total of £850,000. She had no idea it might be worth twice the value of the house! He also brought a number of actual items coming up in the next auction – some v interesting stamps from GB and commonwealth, as well as some very nice European stuff. Altogether a good evening. Next month’s meeting will have a talk about Memel and Memelgebiet – I’m boning up on where this is, when it issued stamps and what they look like. Key words are WW1, treaty of Versailles and Lithuania. I’m still not driving, so had to get to the club meeting by public transport. This was a bus, then a train (3 stops), then another bus across town. I missed the first bus, but my wife kindly dropped me off at the station on her way out to her WI pub evening. And she collected me from the station at the end of the evening. So it’s do-able.
