Sunday Stamps - Romance: Great Britain

 For the romantic amongst you you could not do better than going back to 1476 and reading The Tretyse of Love.

Great Britain - 29 September 1976

The only word I can make out on this is 'passion' - if you are passionate enough to read further it may be available on Project Gutenberg otherwise it might cost you over £1400, a costly present for your Valentine.

It would have been much cheaper just to send a card with this booklet stamp from 2005.

Great Britain - 4 October 2005

For more romantic stamps cross over to Sunday Stamps - Roses

Sunday Stamps - Lunar New Year animals: South Africa, Great Britain

 After 10+ years of Sunday Stamps I have run out of Lunar New Year stamps and have used all other stamps that 'link' to the 12 representative animals.

One lone South African stamp is the nearest I can get to an ox I thought -  

South Africa - African Bull - 31 May 1961

And then purely by chance I found these in my 'odds & sods' box on a cut up card acquired from a market stall more years ago than I remember.

Great Britain - 6 March 1984 FDC

• 16p Highland Cow
• 20/1/2p Chillingham Wild Bull
• 26p Hereford Bull
• 28p Welsh Black Bull
• 31p Irish Mulled Cow

To see other lunar New Year Animals check out those linked to Sunday Stamps.

Sunday Stamps - Countries whose names have changed: Ceylon, Belgian Congo, Czechoslovakia

My brother spent 22 yrs in the Fleet Air Arm on board many of WWII aircraft carriers and on several wartime land bases. One of these was Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka.

Ceylon - 1951

Not exactly an aircraft carrier is it?

Czechoslovakia as the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was under Russian control from 1948 - 1990. In 1993 the country was split into the Czechoslovakia Republic and Slovakia.

Czechoslovakia - 25 September 1967

I have no stamps from Slovakia but some from the Czech Republic.

A Belgian Colony in Africa, the Belgian Congo adopted its present name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1964.

Belgian Congo - 1952/1953

For other countries whose names now do not exist start with Southern Rhodesia at Crowns on Sunday Stamps

Sunday Stamps - Poets; Great Britain, USA

 I went to school in Stamford Lincolnshire and travelled many times by train to Peterborough passing through on the way the village of Helpston.

Helpston was the place where the poet John Clare lived. Clare features on one of the 10 stamps commemorating 'The Romantic Poets' issued in April 2020. 

Coleridge, Blake,Scott, Shelly, Wordsworth, Mary Robinson. Letitia Landon, Keats and Byron are the other poets in the series.

I posted my only stamp for John Keats in 'Poetry in Stamps' nearly 10 years ago - you may find it here http://bit.ly/2KGh0N4

Meanwhile The Romantic Poets series has this for him.

Great Britain - 20 April 2020

My 'Poetry in Stamps' post will, if you checked out the link I gave earlier, includes  Theodore Roethke from the USA series for '20th Century Poets'. The whole series can be seen in one sheet - 

USA - 21 April 2012

I must confess that I only recognised one of these - Sylvia Plath.

For more poets today don't forget to check the links at Tekahion Wake on Sunday Stamps

 

Sunday Stamps - Women on Stamps: Italy, Greece

 When I saw the 'Women in Art' series on Italian stamps I  realised there was a similarity between them all.

Italy - 2 January 2002

The head is from an Etruscan coin. However I had found another woman as the stamp designer was Christina Bruscaglia.

I now have to check the names shown in the bottom right hand corner of each stamp.

I would like to find a stamp that shows the American Lucille Ball but settled in the end for the lady once known as the Greek Lucille Ball.

Greece - 30 November 2011

This is the actress Rena Vlahopoulou in the series commemorating Greek actors. She died in 2004.

For more ladies you can do no better than visiting and following the links at The dressing table at Sunday Stamps,

Sunday Stamps - Science; Great Britain

 The Centenary of the Royal Institute of Chemistry was commemorated in 1977 in the issue of four stamps which also included the winners of a Nobel Prize.

To save you getting a crick in your next the topics and the Nobel Prize winners where - 

• 8.1/2p  Steroids - Conformational Analysis   Barton 1969
• 10p Vitamin C - Synthesis  W N Howarth 1957
• 11p Starch - Chromatography  Martin & Synge 1952
• 13p Salt - Crystallography  W H & W L Bragg 1915

I remember studying crystallography and the work of the Braggs in chemistry lectures at St Andrews in the 1950s.

Fore more science related posts soar over and check the links at Up-up-and- away on Sunday Stamps

Garden Birds in 2020

 The first visitor to our garden in 2021 was this colourful bird - shame it would not look in my direction.

Bullfinch

I keep a spreadsheet of the type of birds that I see in my garden each day. I only saw the bullfinch on two days in 2020. The top ten of the 35 species seen were - 

• Wood Pigeon - every day
• Rook - every day
• Gull - 79% of days
• Blackbird - 63%
• Starling - 63%
• Jackdaw - 51%
• Collared Dove - 45%
• House Sparrow - 41%
• Coal Tit - 40%
• Blue Tit - 34%

The robin that appears regularly when I'm gardening was next at  30%.

On average we saw 21 different birds each month and 8 each day.

My records go back to 2003/4 - but were less complete back then.

I wonder whether this bird will come back more than the once it visited in 2020.