COVER N. 201 - SPAIN

Postmark: Correos CTA Madrid - 11.01.23 - Correos La Compañia de Todos - 24.12.2022 

Posted on the 11 January; Received on the 12th January 2023
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A letter from  neighbouring Spain, with some stuff I ordered. Nothing particularly fancy but some nice mushroom stamps in perfect chromatic synchronisation with the stamps of His Majesty Filipe VI.

Ask anyone to describe a mushroom and I'm sure 99% of the answers will evolve around a well known image of a white stem with a red cap doted white scales. Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric. Usually associated with pine and birch trees, although toxic it seldom is mortal and it seems that the caps are eaten in some places in Europe and Asia  after a lengthy boiling procedure with plentiful water to eliminate the toxins. 

Other than that they are also hallucinogenic...  Go ask Alice....

Anyway best thing to do is to leave them as they are, they are beautiful and if left alone, no one will fill sorry for it...

I do like to "chase" mushrooms. Come November/December I often go walk in the woods nearby just to see and photograph mushrooms. I can identify for sure  a few (not many)  species, but I never pick them, even if I'm 100% sure. Mistakes with mushrooms are paid very dearly and I do like to open my eyes up each new morning...

I do have one mushroom regret though: although the woods here are mostly constituted of pine trees, I have never seen an Amanita muscaria "in the flesh"... So, I think I'll have to make do with the image on the nice 0,78 € stamp on the envelope part of a two stamp set issued on 01JUN2007.

This was the first set of a series that would run yearly until 2009, with two mushroom stamps being issued each year.

The definitive stamp with the effigy of Filipe VI was issued on 02Jan2016.

I do finde tha slogan of the machine applied cancellation quite well conceived: Correos la compañia de todos, (Correos, the Company of everyone) for its intelligent use of the polysemic virtues of "Compañia".