COVER N. 216 -  SWEDEN

Postmark: Kristdala Posten 19.02.23

Posted on the 19th February; Received on the 24th February 2023

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Now that is a careful twist .... second time I see this on a cover from Sweden. On the plus side, it's like opening a collector's cards sachet... you only see what is behind after lifting the protective cover.... nice! Thanks  a lot Milthon.

Now, I have to confess: I'm not that particular about cats. Not that I hate them, and it's really not their fault, but their not my preferred beast. 

It has probably to do with a little trauma I got when I was a child in Santa Maria, Azores....

In the early 70's (of last century, of course), for a lad of 10, living in the little island is the middle of the Atlantic was nothing short of  an euphemism for freedom and discovery, a sort of rite of passage from childhood into an intermediate stage between adolescence and adulthood that really had to be lived to be perceived. Those were probably the happiest days of my life so far.... I had a fishing rod, a band spearfishing gun, a bicycle, soles of feet that were as thick as hooves due to walking barefoot on rocks and lava and packed earth... in short, like DiCaprio, I was King of the World, even though I didn't have a boat... nor a sweetheart, for that matter....

Those days, the island was supplied with imported food stuff from either its next door neighbour, São Miguel,  or from the mainland. But only when the sea conditions would allow it, and I remember the days when there were no potatoes, or there was no sugar, or there was no this or that. I also remember that whenever fresh locally unavailable fruit was imported, everybody had the same desert... and I can't resist a little story:

There was this little boat, a Raínha dos Açores,- the Queen of the Azores -  property of the airport, used for Search and Rescue. Every now and then, leisure trips would be would be organised with the aim of not only using the boat, but also providing some leisure for the airport community.

My sister and I were on one of those trips, once. The trip would be a circumnavigation of the island, something that would take the best part of a day, with stops here and there for the obvious dip into the Atlantic, lunch and so on.

The journey started calmly with the Rainha dos Açores cruising leisurely along the Southern coast of the island on a flat, absolutely calm sea, and everybody was merry, relaxed and enjoying a perfect day (with sangria and all, Lou....)

The supply ship had arrived from the mainland a couple of days before with a load of big, juicy red plums. so everybody had them for snack and desert after lunch.

In the afternoon, the trip would take the boat right across the northern coast, exposed to the wind and so the flat sea of the morning gave way to some trepidation that would evolve into pretty rough see-saw ridding on the way back.

The joyful faces of the morning began to change colour.... normally one would expect them to turn redder, due to the influence of UV, but strangely enough,  though, face complexions started to exhibit an uncommon greenish hue...

Strange noises erupted from bodies perched on the railguards and in a matter of minutes, the small rear deck where the once merry sailors danced and sang, became covered in a brownish red slimy carpet... 

The Plums.....

As William Carlos Williams had put it, they had been indeed delicious, so sweet and so cold, but they had now morphed into something completely different and the image of the brownish red covered deck would stay with me to this day. Luckily I do not get seasick, so I could enjoy the day to the fullest, but my sister, poor darling, was one of the unwilling contributors to my still having a vivid memory of a different day at sea.

Back to cats, and my trauma.

In such a difficult environment regarding the supply of fresh stuff, everybody had a little vegetable garden on the rear of the house and on top of that my father also kept a couple of  little pens with a few chicken and rabbits.

Now, rabbits are prone to multiplication, as everybody knows. and one day one of the does, which I happened to have a large soft spot for, since it had been given me by a school colleague, gave birth to a bunch of little creatures that I discovered in a corner of the pen in their nest, and boy was I happy about it...

Came night, and as I lay on my bed, turning the pages of one of the Karl May's novels that were my trusted companions, those days, I noticed that, outside, there were sounds of a somewhat out of the ordinary "catine" activity. I didn't care much about it, though. Stray cats were as common as flies in the area and every now and then they would make sure their presence was noted...

The next morning, just as I got out of bed,  I went to the pen to check my treasure.... and oh, the terror.... the bloody cats had managed to drag the little creatures through the chicken wire of the pen door and had killed all but one of the little rabbits....a couple of the corpses were still inside the pen...

I cried the hell out of me, for a long while.... 

Every since that day I guess that my relation with cats has been marred by this memory, although of course I have long since put it in context... after all stray cats have to feed themselves... it's the natural course of things....

Anyway, just don't count on me to spend time looking at silly cat videos and say nice things about the protagonists.....(come to think of it, I feel the same towards any other animal... I guess I love and respect them to much to  rationalise their behaviour against a human framework of reference, as it now seems to be so trendy....)

On 25AUG2022 PostNord Sverige issued a set of 5 self-adhesive no face value (standard domestic letter) stamps dedicated to "My cat". Two of these grace my cover, featuring images of "Cornelius", the brown one, and "Fili", the white.

The postmark indicates that the cover was posted in Kristdala, a less than 1000 inhabitants community located in the SouthEast of Sweden, not very far from the Baltic sea.