The Error World Read Online Free PDF

collecting...' I believed this. '... The only one that can interest you whatever type of person you are.' I'm not sure what my dad was doing while I was reading this and mounting. He was probably reading and working on his caseload. 'And if the pictures themselves ever begin to bore (which we doubt), then the search for completion, the chasing of scarce and hard-to-find items, and the study of the stamps themselves as fascinating miniature pieces of printing carry on the interest.' Fatal words.
    That was also the year of the muddy rock festival. Not Glastonbury but Reading, grown bearded men turned into reeking brown sculptures suffering from trenchfoot. My father, who had seen real trenchfoot and would never pay for it, thought the world had gone totally mad, but I just cut out the pictures from the newspapers, put them in a scrapbook, and called it my school project.
    When he went golfing he sometimes took me along as a weedy caddy. The joke in his foursome was that I always knew the ideal club for the particular shot at hand, but this was usually after he had whispered in my ear '2 wood' or '9 iron'. I would then accidentally pull out a 3 wood or an 8 iron, and he would sometimes believe I had overruled him. I was happy to tag along as his friends talked work or politics or Israel (Jews welcome here in Hertfordshire, or at least tolerated, unlike our local golf club in Highgate). There was usually a Heart ice-cream at the end of it as I joined my mother at the clubhouse pool.
    We did play board games together, and with some success. The usual things—Monopoly, Scrabble, Buckaroo (obviously my dad didn't play Buckaroo) and Cluedo, which baffled my mother so much that on one occasion she actually shouted out, 'I did it!' Our favourite was What Am I Bid?, an auction game. The Hamlet cigar adverts were at their peak in the late 1960s, and in one of them a man was at an auction, scratched his nose at the wrong time, and ended up walking home with a stuffed bear as an orchestra played 'Air on a G-String'. We hummed that throughout What Am I Bid?, a simple quest to amass a more valuable collection of antiques than your opponents. This was achieved by bidding on items of furniture (a Chippendale chair, a Sheraton bureau bookcase), porcelain (a Meissen dog), silver (Queen Anne teapot) or something oriental (a Tang period pottery horse). An auctioneer, who was usually my father, would place a picture card on the supplied auction stand, and I, my brother and my mother would bid for it in a desire to complete a category set. The auctioneer ended the auction with a commanding drop of his gavel, and the winning bidder would then discover from the back of the card whether they had won a 'good' example (worth £2,000 in the case of the Meissen dog), a 'poor' one (worth £500), or a fake (£40). There was also a Rarity card in each of the categories, described in the rules as 'an item so rare that it has not been recognised and so miscatalogued'. When one player had obtained three good objects in any one category they could end the game by declaring themselves 'a collector', the ultimate accolade. It was a game I often won, and I think my father helped me by letting me know by a wink or hint when an item he was offering was a fake. In the time when the game wasn't in play, the gavel would have a life outside the box, often used to hammer in nails and kill ants.
    We also played a lot of Collect: A Great New Stamp Collecting Game (made by Stanley Gibbons in 1972). This too was a game of risk and uncertainty—did you want to swap a card in your hand, each denoting a stamp from a certain country or theme, for another of unknown category in a desire to build up a better collection? The winner would be the first to build a set of ten stamps in any one group—GB, USA, Animals or Famous People—but if you went for the Rare set you only needed five. One went around a board having good or bad experiences—'Lose two stamps',