Please help me stamp out my collector’s instinct

It regularly annoys me that a first class stamp costs 85p. Never mind that I’m paying less than a quid for someone to transport my letter halfway across the country and deliver it through some lucky friend or relative’s letterbox – it’s still an outrage.

By rights then, I should have choked on my non-self-seal envelope at the news that the world’s rarest stamp had been bought by a UK-based dealer for £6.2m. It doesn’t even have a pretty picture on it, and you certainly can’t use it to send a postcard.

Yet the instinctive collector in me couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe at the artefact’s staggering value – not only from a monetary point of view, but from a historical one too. The British Guiana 1c Magenta is the only surviving stamp from a small batch printed in what is now Guyana, after a ship carrying a delivery of standard stamps from Britain turned up with the wrong order. Should have used DPD.

Over the years, this remarkable stamp, created out of necessity, has become a prized item, owned by just eight philatelists. When it arrived in the UK this week, it was greeted by an armoured truck; and its new owner described it as being, gram for gram, the most valuable man-made item in the world.

Although stamps have never been my bag, I have had numerous collecting obsessions over the years. My first was car registration numbers, which I would write and guard jealously in a small book, noting the vehicles that paused at the road junction just outside our house. My interest sprang from a book called James the Policeman, which at the age of six had got me interested in detective work. In the event, since I wrote down no information other than the numberplate, my work carried little obvious investigative clout – although I found the book years later and was amazed at how often my infant school headteacher appeared to have driven by (registration CCE 1).

Later in my childhood I began to amass a collection of small pottery animals – first frogs, then owls and cats, and various others along the way. I have no recollection of where I used to get them, but the mini menagerie is still at my parents’ house, patiently waiting for the moment that tat figurines become popular again.

In my mid-teens, my attention turned – a tad darkly, I admit – to Second World War memorabilia. I would hunt around car boot sales and East Anglian antique shops for old gas masks, medals and ration books. I even bought a decommissioned 1943 machine-gun, which stunned a group of builders in Saffron Walden into complete silence as I walked by.

In adulthood, a lack of available space and time has largely forced me to abandon my urges. The closest I get nowadays is treating myself to a new Swatch watch every couple of years, and not dispensing with the old ones.

The common thread running through all my collections is that none of them have gained in value whatsoever, or indeed are likely to. Not for me the luck of finding that an old computer game is now worth over a million pounds, or that a family heirloom is going to cause Fiona Bruce to faint on the Antiques Roadshow. No, my bits and pieces are collectors’ items only in the sense that I collected them, I own them and they are items, however useless and undesirable.

Inevitably perhaps, my longest collector phase was football stickers. Between 1985 and 1992, my peak soccer fan years, I spent almost every penny that came my way on them. I never finished an album, but somewhere in a cupboard is a box with well over a thousand swaps neatly stacked. If you’re still looking for Steve Ogrizovic’s 1988 appearance, I may be able to help. Just send me a self-addressed envelope complete with a British Guiana 1c Magenta stamp and he’s all yours.