01 – The Stamp

Mont Saint-Michel

My grandfather collected stamps. He wasn't as dedicated to philately as he was to Freemasonry, and contact with his worldwide brethren meant that he increasingly had friends well scattered around the globe. In those pre e-mail days all correspondence was done by traditional postal mail services (imagine that), and my guess is that he saved the stamps from the letters he received for his young daughter (my mother), who later  in turn passed the slowly growing collection on to me.

As a child, these simple paper tokens fascinated me – not in the way a postage stamp collector would find them interesting - but for the images, the interesting people and landmarks of foreign lands sometimes represented on their faces. To me they were little works of art, and small hints of the wonders that lay beyond the borders of the isolated small African country which was then my home. I too slowly and occasionally added my own contribution to the family album of world souvenirs.

I cannot explain what it is that makes some images stand out more than others in my memory but in the entire collection, often not looked at for months or even years, there are perhaps five or six stamps I always see or recall when I think of that album.

And one of these is a simple sepia engraving of a tiny island off the coast of France. The post mark on the stamp indicates it was used in 1936, I suspect on an item posted in Calais. It fascinated me – in my young mind I thought it to be France’s own Bali Ha’i, and I decided to find out a little more about it. It has an interesting history. That ‘island’ (which is not always an island) is the Mont Saint-Michel. At the age of around ten I determined I would one day visit the Mount.

Never underestimate the power of your dreams.

It took me another forty years or more, but I did get there.

This then is the image that started my journey. Let me take you there.

Dave