I had upped the 100 stamps Bruno and I had agreed to exchange at his suggestion by returning 200 (from various island nations: Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji etc). He would then send me the second hundred (as he had already sent me the first) and it would save me postage. That made eminent sense to me.
But then I started to get cold feet. I worried that my duplicates weren't up to his very high standards. I emailed Bruno to send me back fewer - say 80 or 70 - if he felt that there was an imbalance.
Sure enough, my friend found some fault or other with as many as half of the stamps that I'd sent. Some stamps were definitives instead of commemoratives and so on. How mortifying! But he let me get away with it, saying that he excused me as a beginner.
But I think everything has evened out. In Bruno's second lot there were a number of more ordinary, common stamps - stamps from Holland and Germany that I remember being among the first I collected as a boy. That's okay. I expect a mixture of good and bad when exchanging duplicates.
One think stayed with me, however. Bruno warned me about storing stamps in a damp environment.
"Take care because all your stamps are smelling humidity, you should keep them away from humide places."
A vision of my friend sniffing the contents of my envelope comes unbidden to mind. Do my stamps smell like truffles?
Myself, I have noticed a certain perfume about packets of stamps that arrive. And now I have an idea why some stamp lots offered for sale over the Internet are advertised as coming from a smoke-free home. In our household we don't use perfumes or scents, and we hardly even use soap (we have never used any on our baby). But no one smokes either, and my stamps don't reek of tobacco. That, at least, I can guarantee!
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