March 22, 2016

Find the gooseberry


This month's excitement comes in a shade of gooseberry. That is the official name of a colour that I am sure many of you will think you've seen before. It seems so similar to a whole range of stamps, from an 18p and even a 19p and 20p through to others that played with shades of olive and green and brown. Having said that, when I looked around I realised that my memory had been playing tricks with me and this is, indeed, different after all!

£1.05 is an airmail rate and we'll now have the usual four 'regional' stamps with yet another denomination too. I am amazed that the designs for the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland stamps have lasted so long.

I am not very fond of the I in place of 1 for the numeral but this has been around for a while now so I guess I shall just have to get used to it.

Whilst there are details of this stamp on the Royal Mail site, I challenge readers to find it using the menus and links. The site really is dreadful, attempting to satisfy business service users as well as us philatelic people. Having said that, a business trading abroad may well have wanted to grab a few sheets of £1.05s today and struggled to do so. The only way I could manage to get the image above and some details was to ignore all the links that come up under 'Shop' and instead just click the Shop tab itself on the bar. There is still no obvious mention in the illustrations that appear but you may spot a link to 'See all our definitive stamps' and there 2016 issues will finally be accessible. You'll find it at this link.

Now this is for a new issue today. Today is when I would expect to see some promotion and some degree of enthusiastic display. But I am not the person running the web site.

And the colour is gooseberry, after all.

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