The Error World (15 page)

For about six years, between the ages of six and twelve, I had collected fluff. Not fluff as in 'something that is superficial', or even fluff as in 'error of delivering lines on stage', but actual fluff from a green carpet in my house.

I don't know how this began, or even why I did it. I used to sit on the stairs in my childhood home and pick at the green carpet with my thumb and forefinger, gathering what I could until I had a thin strip of soft fibres about two inches long and an inch wide. I would then place this on my forehead between my eyebrow and my temple, and derive unqualified pleasure from it, especially when I fell asleep at night. After a few days I would tire of one particular shape or thickness of what I had come to call 'fluff', and then start the process again, keeping my old samples in a tin.

What more can I tell you about this, other than that it helped if you put a few drops of water on the carpet first to aid the tension between finger and weave? For a year or so I did this openly, and then my parents began to object to the unusual wear on certain parts of the carpet towards the top of the landing, and I was forbidden to pick fluff any more. My mother asked a department store for some small green carpet samples so that I could pick in my room without ruining the house, but these were a very poor substitute and usually wouldn't bind properly. I kept picking on the stairs for another five years, built up quite a collection, and then just as suddenly grew bored with it and stopped.

My stamp collecting, by comparison, was a reasonably respectable and basic thing to be getting on with. I was following a path laid down over decades—the natural, predictable and aesthetically pleasing way of accumulating anything interesting: one of every picture stamp and diverting oddities. But some people didn't collect like this, including an old friend of mine called Paul Hersh. I was aware that Paul had collected for years, but we had never talked about it. My wife was friendly with his wife, and his wife would occasionally worry that he was spending a bit too much time and money on stamps, but during my fallow period I never thought to question him about this. We spent our time together talking about his work producing comedy shows for the BBC.

But after I had become hooked on stamps again we got around to the topic immediately, and now we talk of nothing else. His collection is somewhat specialised. In fact, it is the most specialised and craziest collection I have ever seen. It is so specialised and so crazy that he asked me to change his real name when I wrote about it and him, for fear of ridicule from those who may not understand. Hersh collects stamps from Batum and also GRI overprints (
Georgius Rex Imperator,
George V being the reigning monarch at the time of overprinting), but his big thing is Machins. These stamps are the basic labels of postage that people in the UK use every day. They have the Queen's head and the denomination and that's it—no illustration commemorating a special event, just a single-colour background, a big profile of the Queen's crowned head and shoulders based on a bust by Arnold Machin, and the number ip, 2p and upwards in a corner, or maybe the class indicator 'ist' or '2nd'. (British stamps, being the first, have the honour of being the only ones not to bear the name of the issuing country.)

When I first went round to Paul Hersh's house and he took his Machin albums from the shelf, he said, 'Are you ready?' But I wasn't ready at all. Each page of each album had the same stamp on it. There were pages and pages of identical bright green, dull orange, blue, almost blue, and deep olive-grey stamps, not to mention the violet, carmine, ochre-brown and ultramarine.

'How many of these do you have?' I asked him, pointing to the bright-blue ones. 'About 150.'

'And how many Machins overall?' This took him a little longer to work out.

'About 3,360. There are about twenty or thirty I'm missing. But of course that's not including booklet panes and coils. So you could say I only do the fag-end of it.'

They were not, of course, all the same. In fact, they were all different, though you could only tell with the aid of a perforation counter, an ultraviolet lamp, and a ten-inch-thick two-volume catalogue with monthly updates. A 20p stamp has many variations of paper, printer, printing process, gum, phosphor band, shade, perforation, underprint, fluorescence and numerical design, and it takes a certain sort of individual to care. And if they do care, they will also be concerned about many other values, including the vaguely unimaginable 20½p.

The Machin first appeared in June 1967. Arnold Machin was a painstaking sculptor working on a profile of the Queen for new coinage when asked by Tony Benn to produce an image for the definitive stamp. This would replace the portrait produced from the photographic studio of Dorothy Wilding that had been used since her coronation and was looking dated, and the new design was intended to be flattering, regal and simple. It was also intended to last, which, with very modest alterations, it has done for more than forty years. At the beginning of 2008 it overtook the Penny Black and Twopence Blue as the longest-lasting stamp design in the world, undergoing some four hundred different basic colour or price variations (before Paul Hersh and his friends began finding other things interesting or wrong). The stamp has become one of those everyday icons that we use without thinking. Once we have looked at the value, only the most retentive collectors are able to match a stamp's colour to its price. It is estimated that the Machin has been printed almost 200 billion times.

The things that interest Hersh include the following facts and firsts: an early proof of the stamp was printed with the Queen cut off at the neck, but she judged this too naked, approving the design only after the addition of a corsage.

The photograph of Arnold Machin's bas-relief sculpture of the Queen was taken in misty half-light in the car park of the printers Harrison & Sons so as best to define its shadows and details.
^*

The first three stamps—the 4d, 1s and 1s 9d—were printed with phosphor bands to aid automatic sorting, and were also the first stamps in Britain not to have a watermark (the coated paper and phosphor was regarded as guard enough against forgery).

The two-tier first- and second-class postal system was introduced in September 1968, with second class costing 4d and first class 5d. For a year after decimalisation was introduced on 15 February 1971, letters could be sent with a mixture of old and new stamps.

In 1985, for the first time since the Penny Black, the cost of postage went down, second class reduced from 13p to 12p.

In the mid-1980s there were serious attempts to find a replacement design for the Machin, and several straight-on portraits were essayed instead of the traditional image facing towards the left, but they were all rejected; it was tacitly acknowledged that the Machin would endure to the end of the Queen's reign—the older the monarch, the younger and more flattering our vision of her.

Paul Hersh was born in 1960, seven years before the first Machin was printed. He began collecting at the age of eight or nine, but it was mostly mint stamps from the post office and first-day covers. His grandfather bought him a few things, he joined the stamp club at school, and he stopped at about fourteen. He can't quite pinpoint why he got back into it, but he thinks the advent of the home computer was partly responsible. 'Stamps were made for computers,' he told me, 'because they look beautiful when scanned and enlarged, it's so easy to catalogue and trade them, and the nerdery of stamps and the early nerdery of computers were made for each other.'

Having spent many hours talking to Hersh about his stamps, I liked him even more than before. Looking at his albums made me feel very good, because I realised that there were people in a far worse philatelic state of health than I was. 'I got into this very gradually,' he said. 'I used to think there were perhaps six varieties of any one stamp, and when I discovered there were ten or twelve I thought it would be fun to get them all. Then you buy a detailed catalogue and you see there are twenty, so that extends the challenge. Then I found out about the Deegam Handbook [the ultimate guide to identifying and cataloguing all Machins, produced by the fanatical philatelist Douglas Myall], which lists absolutely everything and helps you identify them, and I saw that up until then I had only been dabbling. There are hundreds! It's cosmic! If I had foreseen how I was tumbling helplessly into it all then I would have shot myself.'

In biology lessons I was taught that the big human limb joints worked like elaborate machines. The shoulder, elbow, knee and ankle, an intricate system of pulleys and weights and cogs and lubrications: when they worked you wouldn't think twice, but when they didn't you knew about it. One hot London afternoon in the early 1980s the left knee of my uncle Heinz stopped working, and as we walked across Regent's Park every animal in London Zoo surely realised something was wrong. It was the noise: unhealthy, unnatural, unforgettable. It was as if a comedy oak door (creeeeaaaakkkk) had fallen on pine cones in the frost (crrruunnnchhh). The mechanism had gone. Heinz's lower leg was wooden, and some part of it—perhaps the attachment to what was left of his original leg—needed linseed or cod-liver oil and bedrest. Heinz's leg had been blown off at the end of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, and if only I'd known it needed so much maintenance I'd never have set out on that walk, or at least made sure we didn't get lost. I learnt a lesson that day: modern wars are about oil, but for Heinz the peace was about oil too.

Heinz Bauernfreund (trans.: 'Friend of the Farmer') was married to my mother's sister Eva. My mother came from Israel to London to marry my dad, and Eva stayed in Israel to marry a soldier. They were a lovely couple, but not obviously well matched. Heinz was a dashing model of uprightness, and had a job for life in life insurance; Eva was more rotund and warm:
gemütlich.
They had handsome children, a very busy kitchen, and infidelity. And then there were stamps, which occupied most of Heinz's leisure time and none of Eva's, a gender divide fairly mirrored throughout the world. Some couples get used to it—embrace it even—and some never do, and for my aunt I think her husband's philatelic devotions presented another reason to cast her gaze elsewhere.

They lived in Zahala, a spacious manicured village northeast of Tel Aviv, and the first thing you noticed when you entered their home was how ordered everything was. More particularly, you noticed how irritable Heinz would get if a cushion or drinks coaster was moved beyond a Heinz-defined comfort zone, usually measured with a slide-rule. My father was a little bit like this, and I inherited the gene, but we had it mild next to Heinz. There was an extensive collection of miniature liquor bottles Heinz had picked up on his travels over the years, one hundred or so, some of them very old and definitely undrinkable. He had arranged them on a thin shelf that ran across the top of the door of the main reception room, one long limbless parade-ground. They were so high that guests would never be tempted to rearrange them. But occasionally the movement of the door below would jog a bottle a fraction of an inch out of line, and Heinz couldn't sit down until he had climbed up and set the miniature world to rights. What would Freud have diagnosed in those days before obsessive-compulsive disorder? A need for reassurance; the pleasure and security of ownership; a desire to have everything just as it was and should be forever.

Zahala was neat too. Built after the war for career soldiers and permanent casualties, it was like a model kibbutz without the early mornings. For years its most famous resident was General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defence minister during the Six Day War. Dayan lost his left eye fighting in Lebanon in 1941, and he wore his black eye-patch like a medal of honour (his bodyguard sold it after his death, and it appeared on eBay to maximum outrage in 2005). When a drawing of Dayan appeared on a first-day cover, my uncle walked a few paces up the road and got him to sign it. Zahala's other famous resident was Ariel Sharon, a future prime minister, though few would have predicted it during my uncle's time. In the early 1970s, when I first saw him at the Zahala falafel stand during a holiday, he was a bullish military leader newly embarked on a political career, and people in the neighbourhood were still very conscious of his personal tragedies. Sharon's first wife died in a car crash in 1962, and five years later their eleven-year-old son Gur and a friend were playing with the family gun collection—as Israeli kids in Zahala used to do—when one of them went off. Sharon was at home for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and his son died in his arms. In the mourning and distress that followed, local mothers rounded up as many family guns as they could, and delivered them to Moshe Dayan's house.

Heinz also had a gun, and he didn't give it up. It was self-defence. My other Israeli uncle had a pistol too; the founding generation never felt secure within their borders, national or domestic. In Heinz's case the gun was also self-defence against anyone who might burst in and make a grab for his first-day covers.