Dutch eel

Bertus Beelen comes from Eelde, a place in the Netherlands I'd never heard of, even though my parents are Dutch, and I have visited the country twice, once to cycle around it. Bertus, the 14th equal person to send me used postage stamps, informed me that Eelde was a little town a few kilometres south of Groningen, but that it had its own airport.

Through a mixture of Dutch and English (we could have used just English, as Bertus is fluent in it, but I wanted to try out the language I learned as a kid) we agreed to exchange 50 commemoratives from our respective countries. I wondered what they would look like . . .

Modern European postage stamps - also Australia, USA, Brazil - to seem to be converging to a common form. They have informal subjects (cartoons!?), using a lot of white as background and around the  edges. It's hard to tell at a glance which countries they might be from.

I prefer the older kind. They had/have more personality, dignity etc. And because they didn't come out so often it was possible to collect all of them.

I'm going to have to think about specializing . . .