Nutters

If I were feeling polite that would be enthusiasts, but really nutters is the word. On occasions I get to index the journals produced by groups of them, particularly the philately inclined, train-spotters, ship-spotters, family history types and sports fans. And every time one of them lands on my desk I find myself marvelling. Great wads of time, energy and passion are dedicated by these people to learning all about 'The long and varied life of locomotive number 250' or all the NZ ships ever called 'Kaituna'. Anyway, I don't get it, and no doubt I never will. Sometimes I think that is great, you know contributing to the variety of life, whole weird mess of Hugh Manatee and all that. But mostly I think it is just weird.
I also like to ponder which of this selection of idiosyncratic ways of filling in time is the oddest and I do believe that the award has to go to Postal History, the people who are interested in the variety of 'Return to Sender' stamps used in 2001.
This may be in part due to the summer I spent working at the CPO in Auckland where, because I started a week earlier and was 19 rather than 17 years old, I was often the senior sorter during 2-shift on the line sorting mail for the Gulf Islands. At about 3pm on a Friday, me and my trusty (and junior) sorter, who's name I can not for the life of me remember, would go downstairs to the registered mail office and pick up that week's registered items. All very formal I'd sign various things and what's-her-name would stamp them. She usually handled the stamp because it was attached to a hammer and I am something of a weakling and didn't have the heft to handle it with any of the required aplomb. Anyway then we'd hoe back up stairs, tie off the island bags and send them on their way. So, while that was fun and pretty much the highlight of my working week, it has not left me with much respect for the official-ness of the postal service.
It is somewhat sad, that was the last summer that the CPO was the CPO or that they hired in summer students. My student days at the end of the 80s-beginning of the 90s were very much a time of the passing of the old ways. I was in the very last year that graduated without loans.

Anyway speaking of nutters of an entirely different stripe. I am reading the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I am not very far in, he is only about 20 yet. May I say, even making allowances for it all being a different time and place, what a nutcase. Not unentertaining but.