Alphabet 2023 | B Is for Barrière

This is the third postcard I have got from Bryon's project (Alphabet2023). It should have been the second, shouldn't it? But the first one was C and the second one was A... Actually, the alphabet not arriving on the right order adds some fun.

The postmark was applied by some flickering hand or postal machine, but you can still notice that it was posted in Barrière, British Columbia. Balfour Mount and Bruce Chown are featured on the stamps. And you can count one more B for bilingual stamps!

Fancy a Hot Beverage? (1)

Letter sent to Heleen (the Netherlands).

(Original designs by Merle Goll. Just trying to learn how to draw by imitating great illustrators.)

Royal Flowers

I have got two stamps from the Flowers series, issued by Royal Mail on 9 March 2023. This is the first issue that features the silhouette of King Charles III. This is the first change of silhouette in the UK stamps since 1968.

A Simple Woman

«[...] your other grandmother is a simple woman, my mother would tell us, and because she was a simple woman she was desperate to receive letters;»

Birgit Vanderbeke, The Mussel Feast

Alphabet 2023 | A Is for Atka

As the first letter-postcard I got was C, I did not grasp immediately Bryon's project: sending the whole alphabet during 2023. That would make a lot of postcards!

This was supposed to be the first. Mailed from Atka (Alaska), it got an extra postmark from Alaskan frontier. 

One of the stamps belongs to the 1982 State Birds & Flowers issue and depicts the state bird of Alaska, Willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus) and the official flower of Alaska, forget-me-not (Myosotis alpestris). The other two stamps depicts a porcupinefish and Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Sunday Stamps | Easter

Today's Sunday Stamps is dedicated to Easter. My country does not issue Easter stamps, I found a couple in my collection, more than forty years old, and a recent one from the USA not exactly intended for Easter.

Suriname, 1980

Grenada, 1976

USA, 2022

I wish happy Easter to all those who celebrate it!

Alphabet 2023 | C Is for Coloma

Postcard sent by Bryon (the USA), full of C!

Circus stamps from 1993, and a California condor. The postcard was mailed in Coloma, California. That condor intensely looking at the postmark makes me smile, because coloma, in Catalan, means 'female dove or pigeon'.

A Chronicle of Hours and Days

«My friend Delia, reading over letters from her friends in the early 1990s when she was a student in America, said:

It was funny reading these letters back. Sometimes they would be written over days, or even weeks, they’d stop and start and stop again: “Sorry, got distracted with something. Anyway …” Or be continually updated: “Well, I finally got a phone call from X, you won’t believe what happened …”

They were provisional, real-time, patched-together accounts of life as we lived it, as it occurred, on the spot. An unspooling of self onto the page in real time.

Or selves perhaps; each letter, each recipient, facilitating an adjustment of the self, a tweak: there’s the correspondent we make laugh, the correspondent we confide in, the correspondent to whom we offer advice and comfort. Like a diary, a letter can function as a “chronicle of [one’s] hours and days”, but because it is, in essence, a two-way communication – an ongoing, unfinished conversation – a letter invokes a relationship so it needs to be sensitive to the reader in ways a diary need not.»

Edwina Preston, Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting ‘the full catastrophe of life

Here Comes the Sun (II)

Big letter (look at the size of the pens!) sent by Phillip (the USA). Envelope made of a placemat from a cosmic restaurant.

The Sun Science Stamps are really stunning!

Here Comes the Sun (I)

Postcard sent by Phillip (the USA), with matching stamps. It is difficult to take a proper picture of these foiled stamps...

Drinks & Foods & Postcards

Typical Malaysian Sweets

From a French Cooking Notebook

Wine is sunlight, held together by water. 

Postcards sent by Sarah (Malaysia), Fabienne (France) and Bryon (USA).

Graham Bell

This postcard featuring Graham Bell and a prototype telephone, sent by Bryon (Canada) landed in my mail box last week. 

On the back, among others, I found this stamp featuring Mr Bell, issued in 1947 to commemorate the centenary of his birth. 

There are a lot of stamps celebrating the invention of the telephone. Royal Mail issued a series of four in 1976, on the centenary of the first telephone call.

Finding phones on stamps seems quite common!

Sunday Stamps | Languages

Languages is a favourite theme (not only on stamps), so I'm glad today's Sunday Stamps is dedicated to A different language.

2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and France issued this stamp to commemorate it. I have just learned that 2022-2032 is the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

Stamp issued by Russia on 6 June 2016 to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Pushkin Russian Language Institute.

This stamp belongs to the series The Welsh Bible (1588-1988), issued by Royal Mail in 1988 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Bishop William Morgan’s translation of the Bible into Welsh. 

Spanish stamp from 2014, celebrating the 3rd Centenary of the Real Academia Española ('Royal Spanish Academy'), an official institution with the mission of ensuring the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and affiliated with national language academies in 22 other countries.

The books on the stamp forming a "III" are their famous dictionary of Spanish language.

I have never got this stamp on a letter, but I have sent it several times and it is in my collection. It was issued in 2007 to celebrate the centenary of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans ('Institute for Catalan Studies'), an academic institution which seeks to undertake research and study into all elements of Catalan culture. The IEC is known principally for its work in standardizing the Catalan language. 

On the first day postmark and cover, however, the name of the institution is written in Spanish. Correos is very reluctant to issue stamps in Spanish languages other than Spanish: only one of the Christmas stamps says Happy Christmas in Basque, Catalan and Galician... some years. 

Postbox Saturday | Castelló de la Plana

Happy Veggies

This stamps have low values. I have got them more than once, used to complete the due postage rate. But they always cheer me up!

And what about these cheerful veggies from Belarus?