Hello, I’m James — collector of stamps, hoarder of family photographs, and the person behind everything you’ll read here.
The stamp thing started early. My grandfather kept his duplicates in a shoebox, and when I was seven he’d let me sort through them on Sunday afternoons. He died when I was twelve, and I inherited the shoebox along with a red Lighthouse album I still use. I’ve been collecting ever since: British commemoratives mostly, with a soft spot for anything with a ship, a fox, or an engraving mistake on it.
The family-documentation thing started later and snuck up on me. Somewhere between my son’s first steps and my daughter’s first lost tooth, I realized the photos on my phone weren’t a record of anything — they were just a pile. So I started building rituals around keeping the small moments: a monthly photo in the same chair, two sentences in a notebook every night, an album the kids can actually pull off a shelf.
This blog is where the two hobbies meet. Expect posts about stamp collecting for normal people (no investment talk, no auction drama), about documenting family life without turning it into a production, and about the strange overlap between the two — because it turns out that keeping an album of stamps and keeping an album of your children require exactly the same virtue: showing up regularly in small, unglamorous ways.
I live with my wife and our two kids, in a house with too many albums and not quite enough shelves. Thanks for reading.