Collectors of the world: spice up your life!
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
1M ago
The UK has released Spice Girls stamps, and I have to blog about them because it’s like this issue has been AI-designed to attract my attention. So here we go. Chicas to the front. I didn’t think it would be difficult to write this piece. Pop culture on stamps is my bread-and-butter, and I’ve covered a bunch of these UK music issues before. But I’m really struggling to nail a consistent opinion. I want to say that this issue embodies so much of what I detest about the Royal Mail’s stamp policy. I also want to say that it’s exactly what we should have more of. Can 2 become 1? Let’s find out! P ..read more
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Guess who’s back?
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
2M ago
I vaguely remember 2023. There I was, chugging along with a stamp collecting blog, which had just spun off into a podcast-slash-YouTube-channel co-starring my wife. We were a few episodes in, with the promise of more on the way, and then everything just… disappeared. Blog, podcast, most of my social media presence, just gone, like a post office teller during the lunchtime rush. If you’ve heard this before, you’ll know the excuse. At certain times of the year, my day-job requires a lot of my time, and after I squeeze the rest of life’s demands around those hours, radio silence can descend upon ..read more
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In Those Days… were stamps cool?
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
10M ago
My friends Penny and Christina host a podcast called In Those Days. In each episode, alongside a guest or two, they delve into Trove, a wonderful archive of Australian historical newspapers that’s compiled by the National Library of Australia. It’s informative, occasionally startling, and very funny. A few weeks back, they kindly invited my wife Celeste and me to join them. You might know us as the duo behind the stamp collecting podcast Stamps Aren’t Cool. Is it too early to start guesting on other people’s shows after only three episodes? I think not. If you’ve heard our podcast, you’ll kno ..read more
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Stamps Aren’t Cool Episode 3: When Lizzie met Eddie
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
10M ago
My wife Celeste and I launched our podcast, Stamps Aren’t Cool, back in March, promising fortnightly episodes, even though we had a lovely big holiday in France booked for April. What fools we were. We planned ahead, recording a couple of episodes that we could edit and publish while we were on the road. It worked, a bit. Editing Episode 3 was a useful way to while away the time on those long flights, and on the cool superfast trains that carried us around France. But it turns out that there’s only one thing more interesting than sitting in edit for hours watching ourselves talk about stamps ..read more
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See you at Stampex 2023
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
11M ago
I’ve just returned home from a month-long holiday in France. And I mean just. I’m looking at my screen through jet-lagged eyes at some godforsaken hour at which I would normally be sleeping. There WILL be typos. The holiday (with Mrs Punk) was the trip of a lifetime, thirty-three years in the making. Thirty years, because that’s about how long I’ve wanted to visit France, and three extra years because our original planned trip to France became a smoking binfire back in 2020, thanks to the outbreak of Covid. (This holiday is the reason for the sudden lack of episodes of the podcast that I’ve be ..read more
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Stamps Aren’t Cool Episode 2: Drop the scissors!
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
1y ago
The audio podcast version of this episode encountered a tech glitch that led to an incorrect episode link being supplied with the feed. If you found this page after hitting a 404 error but then figuring it out for yourself, apologies for the inconvenience. Last week saw the launch of the first episode of Stamps Aren’t Cool, the new podcast in which my wife grills me about my hobby and I try not to go too nerdy in case she kicks me under the desk. It seems to have been received very well. We weren’t sure if anyone would be interested, but the ‘listens’ on podcasting platforms and the views on ..read more
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Stamps Aren’t Cool Episode 1: Let’s post this!
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
1y ago
All right, the teaser seem to have successfully landed on Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon, iHeartRadio, ListenNotes, and our home base at ACast, so we have a squad. Series 1 of my new podcast Stamps Aren’t Cool is GO! Normally, this post would contain the various stamps and other stuff that we might be talking about on the episode. But because it’s Episode 1, it’s really just Celeste and me introducing ourselves and contemplating how we came to be here. If you didn’t read my previous post, Celeste is the non-collector co-host of the podcast. She also happens to be my wife, and is therefore very ..read more
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Punk’s got a podcast!
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
1y ago
I’ve been quiet on the blog lately, because guess what: I’ve been cooking up a podcast! Today is launch day! In related news: meet my wife, Celeste! That’s her in the picture. Yes, we’re calling it Stamps Aren’t Cool. We thought of calling it Stamps ARE Cool, but we weren’t sure that the internet would understand that we were being tongue-in-cheek. I mean, don’t get me wrong, at least one of us thinks that stamps are cool, but as far as a the wider world is concerned, it’s difficult to mount a case that stamps are, objectively, cool. Anyway. Over the years, a few people have suggested I shoul ..read more
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Drawing a line in the sand
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
1y ago
A new year means a new Australia Post Stamp Poll, an event that is eagerly awaited by the entire world. Well, stamp collectors. Australian stamp collectors. OK, maybe just me.   Each year, collectors are invited to nominate their favourite issues. They ask for at least a top five, but the question has to be asked: if you’re not arranging all 37 issues in order of your preference, are you even alive?   My narrow favourite this year was ‘Bush Seasonings’, celebrating ingredients drawn from Australia’s native flora. It’s a neat design. Each seasoning sits under the plant from which it i ..read more
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Long live the Queen
The Punk Philatelist
by The Punk Philatelist
1y ago
The sudden and unexpected death of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of just 96 has brought to a premature end Britain’s definitive stamps, the ‘Machin head’ series. And just when it was starting to really hit its straps, too. I used to be cynical about Machins. The evidence can be found in the archives of this very blog, but I’ll spare you the search and just repeat my Rage Against the Machin joke, because the classics never age. But I’ve done a complete 180. My Machins are now laid out in an orderly fashion in their album, with notes pointing out the many small variations. For a night’s enterta ..read more
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