Straight On To The Blog Today,

as soon as I have finished I have to do my 90 day check in at immigration, but back to yesterday, I decided to carry on putting my new acquisitions into the album,

so I spent the morning printing white on black labels for the new stamps, another day should see some order descend from chaos!

theses are a couple of 'stamps' I purchased last night on E-Bay, I put the stamps in inverted commas as they can not be used as postage, the first was an advertising stamp, some times known as a Cinderella from Lloyd's Bank given away as a souvenir from the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, I have tried to find out more about them but so far only know there is the red version which is waiting for me in the UK and that a black version is also out there some where,

the second from the Festival Of Great Britain in 1951, a charity stamp for the fund for the blind, it features 'Flying Saucer' & Travelling Exhibition, I wonder where it is now and what it actually did, the price for theses two rarities? the first £2.29 and I went a bit over board for the second at £5.59, it may seem like a lot but I look at it this way, look around if you are a collector and try to buy another one, there are not any out there, of course it could be that I am the only person that collects them, or just that they are extremely rare, but in any event I still enjoy looking at them,

then feet up for the first series of Rumpole of the Bailey, we watched three, or at least I should say I did Diana slept through the last half of the first one, Rumpole and the Younger Generation, Horace Rumpole is a middle-aged "junior" barristers who excels at criminal cases, Rumpole defends Jim Timson, the youngest member of the lovable but criminal Timson clan, followed by Rumpole and the Alternative Society, Rumpole stays with some old RAF friends in the West Country, while he defends a member of a local commune charged with drug-dealing, lastly from the series Rumpole and the Honourable Member, this episode a much more serious one, Rumpole defends Ken Aspen, a Labour Member of Parliament who is charged with rape, Aspen's defense is that the victim made the advances and that the sex was consensual, but was it? to round off the evening Hercule Poirot's Christmas, when Simeon Lee, a mean-spirited, tyrannical patriarch of a dysfunctional family, summons his offspring to his country manor house in Kent for Christmas, he employs Poirot to attend the reunion, guess who ends up dead? then a nursery rhyme, Hickory Dickory Dock, when a series of apparently minor thefts plagues a university hostelry run by Miss Lemon's sister, Poirot is recruited to investigate, Celia Austin, a pharmacological major, confesses that she is a kleptomaniac and responsible for most of the thefts but denies stealing several objects including a stethoscope, light bulbs, and a student rucksack, but what a strange collection of items, what can it all mean? then off to bed.