COVER N. 409 -  SENEGAL

Postmark: Passy La Poste Senegal 12.02.2024

Posted on the 12th February; Received on the 20th February 2024

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Lately, my blog has been a bit on the quieter side,  in what concerns adding new entries to the list of countries, postal administrations and services. Well, this week has proved fantastic in this respect and I have quite a number of new entries to register, blame it on the usual suspects....

I can't even say how grateful I am to all those friends who keep doing their best to ensure that my list keeps getting bigger and bigger. I said it before, they are truly appreciated contributors to this blog, and these lines are as theirs as mine, conceptually, of course, since the opinions I sometimes express are but mine and mine alone.

When I started this blog I was naively counting on the exposure that the internet now allows us, so that someone, somewhere, who might share an interest in the hobby would contact and we'd be able to swap a cover or two. In fact, this was the way I started, as what I did was exactly to search the internet for cover collecting blogs and email their authors, enquiring if they would want to swap covers.

Still, my expectations proved too high. That is not to say that I haven't been contacted by a few fellow collectors wanting to swap covers, but these were quite few and far between. The fundamental step was really joining the London Cover Circuit Club and be part of the universe of like-minded blokes and blokesses who enjoy receiving traditional mail in gorgeous envelopes embellished with no less beautiful stamps, who are members of the LCCC.

This simple action exponentially increased my cover traffic and, what’s more, exposed this unpretentious blog to the immense generosity of some friends who, as I said above, have been doing their best to ensure its posts remain as diverse and inclusive as possible.

To all of them; to all of you: Muito Obrigado!

And so a new country joins the list: Senegal, right in front of the archipelago where I spent my  first years of existence... curiously enough, Senegal as a Republic and myself are the same age; we both were born in 1960, on very similar latitudes,..

Hartelijk dank, Eric!

- I love mangoes. they are quite common nowadays in fruit shops and supermarkets, but that was not so when I was a child back in the seventies of last century, here in my country. At that time, there was not that many people who lived in mainland Portugal who knew what a mango was, let alone how it tasted... myself included, I should add, since even if I had heard my mother and father mentioning how sweet and tasty they were, I had no recollection of them. But that would finally come to an end when somewhere around 76-80, a friend of mine, who had Cape Verdean  relatives, gave me one of the little mangoes that grow in the archipelago, so that I could finally taste it.

Funny how a stamp can trigger such a recollection.... 

The 100 stamp illustrated with the image of a mango and a mango tree, is part of a four stamp set  (90; 100; 125; 145 CFA Francs) issued on 30MAY1991, dedicated to local fruits trees and their fruits.

- Diana Spencer, Diana of Wales, Lady Di... a fairy tale gone sour, a tragic life with an even more tragic ending,.. sad...  no need to talk about it... everyone knows the story... 

Why would a Francophile and Francophone country like Senegal, issue on 16JAN1998, no less than 4 one stamp souvenir sheets plus two 9 stamp souvenir sheets, for a total of 22 stamps dedicated to Diana Princess of Wales is something that transcends reason in my humble opinion, but that was the case, and the two  200 CFA Franc stamps on the cover are part of one of those sheets.

The nice bi-colour postmark hails from Passy, some 150 km as the bird flies from Dakar, the country's capital.