Since my last report from the frontier of existence, things have changed.
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Autumn, and life in general, has become more unpredictable and damp around the edges.
The roof leak has re-appeared, the verandah restoration has ground to a halt because of intermittent rain and Petgirl, our resident lockdown evacuee, has returned to Melbourne with Jasper the cat after three years of respite from the oppressive towers of glass and steel.
I suspect she is not alone in her journey back to the world.
But, as always, there are slivers of light among the approaching greyness.
Petgirl’s flight from the nest has left an empty room save for a desk with drawers and an old wardrobe.
This leaves us the chance to further de-clutter our lives and replace memories of days spent in COVID retreat, dog walks around Victoria Park Lake, Saturday morning newspaper quizzes and a shared bowl of salt and vinegar crisps with a glass of champagne at 4.30pm, with new memories.
But first, the detritus of a 27-year-old daughter’s life has to be rummaged and sorted.
In her desk draw we found an old hardback book wrapped in brown paper, as was the custom when books were precious things.
On the cover was a title ‘The ‘Improved’ Postage Stamp Album’, which had been studiously written in cursive script, underlined and Sellotaped to emphasise its importance.
This was my older brother David’s stamp album from 1955 when he was 11, and I had just arrived to torment him with late-night wails and demands for milk and later, for stamps of my own.
Dave gave his stamp album to Petgirl as a parting gift in 2017 a year before cancer took him at the age of 76.
He figured as a librarian, she would take better care of his treasured collection than his fickle younger brother.
Inside the Stanley Gibbons album were 780 stamps carefully recorded, licked and glued to its gridded and yellowing pages.
They come from far-flung and deliciously exotic places such as Zanzibar, Riau, Tristan da Cunha and the French Antarctic Territory.
Some are from places that no longer exist: Rhodesia, Yugoslavia and Tanganyika.
Each country’s stamps display the things it considers important.
So from Soviet-era Hungary and Poland we get speeding trains and new monumental post-war buildings.
France celebrates its first television space satellite, San Marino bright orange ripening corn, and from Russia, of course, we get Sputnik and more speeding trains.
For some strange reason Nicaragua has a commemorative set of Boy Scout stamps.
Australia’s page was disappointing — just a collection of crowned heads from George V to his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II.
Not even a kangaroo or a Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Perhaps that was a reflection of how little my brother thought about the Australia of Menzies and Maralinga.
For an 11-year-old boy in the 1950s, a stamp album was a door into that big exotic world beyond the bedroom.
It didn’t matter that you could buy 50 stamps in a paper bag from a shop down the street for one shilling and sixpence.
Each one was the chosen emblem of a foreign country with or without a watermark — and a foreigner may have even licked it.
A stamp album was a time machine, a travelogue and a history lesson all in one.
I went on to collect stamps too, but my enthusiasm waned when The Beatles and television arrived.
Today, stamp albums are a nostalgic curiosity.
Philately is still a thing, but the magic has gone for many young people lured by Google and Instagram.
Petgirl left her uncle Dave’s old stamp album behind as she returned to the cut and thrust of the modern post-lockdown world.
It comes from a time when international travel for most people was impossible, worlds were confined and expectations small — a bit like the past two years.
Today, as the world opens up again, perhaps the old stamp album’s sentimental value has diminished even further.
But I like to think that for a while, its pages of little windows sustained Petgirl as her world shrank to a tiny bedroom in her childhood home.
Columnist