I've been looking for some old stamps for my grandaughter who has decided to start collecting them and I came across a huge bundle of envelopes I received from people all over the world when I first published my book. I have almost 400 stamps from so many different countries.
I'm amazed at how many I have and I think I should belatedly publish a word of thanks to all those people who took a chance on sending me a cheque to buy my book. There was no PayPal nor anything similar back in 1997 and it must have seemed a risky purchase to send a cheque from one side of the world to the other. The cheques themselves took six weeks to clear if they were in any denomination other than Pounds Sterling, which most of them were, but I couldn't leave people waiting all that time so I just sent the books and hoped the cheques would clear. They all did and for that I'm extremely grateful.
So I'd like to offer a belated thank you to all those people who risked a sum of money, with very little information about myself. I guess we have grown older and wiser since then and are much more aware and wary of internet scams than we were back then. The internet was a new and exciting toy whose dangers most of us didn't fully appreciate. Not only are we now much more clued up on the dangers of the internet but we are more cynical unfortunately.
My Spanish holiday gave me some much needed thinking time and I discovered some more information which has enabled me to produce a more accurate picture of the precise proportions of two parts of the mechanism. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of information Bessler managed to secrete in various places under our eyes, without our noticing. Anyway back to work, time marches on!
JC
