Stamps often invoke memories, at least in me, as I'm sure it is perceivable from some of my posts of this blog...
I got this nice FDC from France and, as usual, my first look was at the rather striking stamp... Expo 2025 Osaka says the legend on the stamps top sheet margin....
1970, the year I landed, on its very first day, in the island of Santa Maria, Azores, for an almost 4 year stay that would in many ways mark me for the rest of my life.
My family, like most airport worker's family, lived in one of the tin houses that had been left there by the American military who built the airport during the second world war. It was a nice house (once you got used to the sound of the rain on the tin roof, and emptying the rat traps from the pantry) and for the first time I had my own room, my private universe, filled with comics books, books from the Gulbenkian itinerating library (with its beloved Citroën H van) and my first model aircraft kits.
My house was geminated with a symmetrical one, wherein lived the family of one of my father's colleagues.
This gentleman collected stamps. Once he showed me his collection and how he would carefully file his stamps in an album using black hawid mounts.
I had to have one such album for myself.... I was already collecting stamps, I had a few in a binder but nothing comparable to the outstanding album my neighbour had shown me, which he had rather filled up with Portuguese stamps from way behind up to the day.....
So I asked my father if I could have one such album, and if I could also start collecting Portuguese stamps. I got a yes on both accounts, but the album would have to wait, for it could only be bought on the mainland, but I do remember that the vey first issue that my father ever bought me was the one dedicated to the Osaka Expo of 1970.
Incidentally, the album would come a couple of years later for Xmas, as well as a couple of packs of Hawid mounts.
My original album is long gone, lost in the bends of a rather twisty growing up road and I really only started to look at stamps again with interested eyes a few years ago, when I started this blog as a way to fill the available free time that the horrific Covid pandemic suddenly imparted us all with.
But looking at the beautiful stamp on Roland’s cover, made me go back in time, to a time and place that I particularly hold dear and that is worth much more than the face value on the stamp... Un grand Merci, cher ami!
The 36th world expo will be taking place at Osaka,
Japan, from the 13th April to the 13 October 2025.
France being a participant, la Poste, on
21APR2025, issued the 2,10 celebratory stamp on the cover, illustrated
with a view of the French Pavilion, which is designed around the concept of
"A Hymn to Love", and aims at making people question themselves about
their relation with the world at large: themselves, the others and the
environment.
Guiding people on their journey is the red thread of
fate, (a promenade stairway that takes visitors through the pavilion's
different levels) an eastern Asiatic tradition centred around an invisible
thread that guides people to meet and connect.
The First day cancellation is illustrated with the logo
of the French Participation in the Expo.
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