We Continued To Stay Indoors,

due to the continuing Songkran celebrations,

 it is of course great fun, it is just that we did not wish to get wet,

so I decided to spend the day arranging some of my new stamp purchases, so glasses on and here we go,                        

 I was quite lucky with these, a half a sheet of charity stamps issued by the Red Cross to help the war effort, these issued in 1916, they were available in a number of colours but is not very often half sheets are found, normally just single stamps are offered,

 even rarer this pair of unperforated stamps, which were issued for the fourth Philatelic Congress that took place in Margate in 1912, rare because they are gummed but not perforated, but like the war fund stamps they are of course not real stamps and cannot be used for postage,

but these of course are real stamps in the countries in which they are issued, I had some time ago decided to try and collect a complete set of the 1935 King George V Silver Jubilee stamps, they were issued around the world, all of the stamps I collected were postmarked, that means they have been used but I'm facing an uphill struggle, to collect each stamp I need to find 249 different ones plus of course a couple which many collections do not have because of their rarity,

 like this Egyptian stamp which has been overprinted 'Jubilee Commemoration 1935', the example above has been used, the overprinting means that British forces stationed in Egypt used this stamp on the back of the envelope to avoid paying the full price of postage,

this is an example of a unused 1935 British forces overprinted stamp, either one of these would bring the total number in the set to 250,

 but there is one stamp that many collectors do not put in the Silver Jubilee collection, although technically not a Jubilee stamp I think it is nice that the Christmas 1935 three milliemes overprinted stamp of the 1 piastre makes a nice addition to the set,

but perhaps almost the rarest of the rare to complete the Silver Jubilee 1935 collection is the "Tristan da Cunha" overprint on 1/2p and 1p Great Britain Silver Jubilee issues, these overprints were prepared and applied in Britain after the postmaster of Tristan, Rev. Harold Wild, requested it, the overprint was applied to only thirty-six 1/2p and 1p values with each stamp individually numbered, if only I could find a pair of the only 36 printed what a find that would-be, 

there is of course one other stamp issued in 1935 for the Silver Jubilee, the famous Prussian blue, that is the rarest of the rare in this series of stamps,

 this is a normal 1935 Silver Jubilee blue stamp,

and this is one that every Silver Jubilee stamp collector is after, a genuine Prussian blue, there is quite a story behind the stamp, it all started with the printers printing sheets of the stamps before realising they were using the wrong coloured ink, all of the sheets were destroyed except the few that made it to the post office in Upper Edmonton, Stanley Gibbons and GB philatelists confidently claim that a maximum of 480 of these stamps have ever existed in circulation, now if only I had the money to buy one of these our collection would be one nearer to being complete,

whew! after a day collecting our stamps and watching some of the new series that have just been released like Babazon we again watched some from Silent Witness, Peripheral Vision was the first that we watched which involved an insurance fraud, then Safe, Prof Leo Dalton after his conviction for drink and driving helps serve his community service sentence in south-east London, where inter community gangs make a disturbing and unwelcome appearance leading to murder and mayhem, with that we were then off to bed.