How the power of words can take us to faraway places - Ian McMillan

When my dad was in the Navy he eventually got promoted to such giddy heights that he got his own cabin but it wasn’t in any way a luxury suite with a fine view of the South China Sea.

My dad loved fishing and he would often spread his arms wide to demonstrate the size of the fish that got away; he would stand there like the Angel of the North in a battered hat with fishing flies stuck in it and we’d all shake our heads because we knew that fishermen loved to exaggerate.

My dad liked his cabin, though; it was a space he could call his own, and once he’d finished the letter to his fiancée he would, so he told me, “get out the albums”. For a while when I was young I thought he meant LPs or 78 RPM records but he meant his stamp albums.

As the rest of the boat tried to sleep or read books or stared into space or argued and almost got into fights, he stuck stamps in albums. He loved the fact that he could travel the world and then remember the places he’d visited by filling those big hardbound books with rectangular and square and sometimes triangular mementos.

When he had shore leave, instead of rushing to the nearest bar to buy beer, he’d go to the nearest Post Office to buy stamps. Long after he’d left the Navy, he would sometimes get the stamp albums out and look at them fondly. I found it odd that there were often pages and pages of the same stamp, but he could remember (or he said he could) where he’d bought each one. They were like his very own map of the places he’d been and somehow they made that tiny cabin grow into the whole world.

So when I’m moaning about being stuck in this small room I remind myself that it’s bigger than my dad’s cabin; I’m lucky I’ve got a space for writing and reading and I’m lucky that the writing and reading can, like my dad’s stamp albums, take me anywhere I like.

Who knows when this lockdown will end and who knows what kind of world we’ll stumble into when it’s all over, but I think I know one thing: the power of words to carry us far from the places we’re stuck in won’t diminish. It will grow.

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