A very special stamp collection ...

It's been a very sad time as my dear mum passed away on 24th March after a short illness.She was interested in many things, loved to travel with my dad and later on with our  family, and sometimes on her own.   She had been involved in the Stamp business they ran together for many years and also collected stamps, but in a fairly specialised way.I thought I'd feature some of her stamps, the first ones being on a theme of "Where we've been". Instead of collecting vast amounts of stamps, she preferred to narrow it down to stamps featuring places, towns and buildings they'd visited, so there may be just a handful for some countries, such as Egypt.  Egyptian monuments are shown on these stamps, but one was issued by United Arab Emirates (bottom left) and shows the Colossi of Memnon - two immense seated figures of Amenhotep III , made of sandstone..

Add caption

With her love of travelling, she kept diaries for all the holidays she went on, with a few additions from my dad, who liked to include more factual pieces of writing along with her daily record of events, meals etc.  and often some very amusing comments about the people they encountered, and things that may have gone wrong!

Through her many diaries she was able to revisit some of these special places, and they are interesting for me to read too!  I also keep diaries, but my stamp collection is not confined just to places I've visited, but more to the countries as a whole.I feel it maybe time to downsize. But today, a friend who'd visited Egypt gave me a gift .. Egyptian Stamps.

From my mum's diary I learned that she had bought a cat statue and I later found it  in her other special  collection, cats!
Here's a combination of the two!

Egyptian cat statues with Egyptian stamp gift!