Stamp collecting

Yes - I am guilty - well I guess you could say "I'm recovering".

I still have most of the stamps I've ever collected... somewhere... I would've been given this album about the time it was published (1972).  I'd never used it for its intended purpose but, I did use it in (what appears to be) the mid-late 1980s.

I've included the inside cover of the album and also a couple of mazes I invented in (I think) late 1988.  Oddly enough, it was on this day in 1988 (8/8/88) that I rode on a roller coaster built into a shopping centre in the centre of Brisbane.  I remember because I kept the ticket somewhere because it was such a cool date.  A friend had just moved to Brisbane and I went to visit her and to see Expo'88 (not my sort of thing - I hate queuing almost as much as I hate ads on TV) but it was okay.

The coloured drawing in the extras was inspired by the roller coaster. It was a purpose built maze built in the shape, roughly, of a pyramid.  It had a void in the centre and, once you climbed to the top, you could exit on a hessian mat via a slippery dip (a slide).  It was a clear tube so you would (a) not fall out and (b) see everything.

The second one is a more traditional but again purpose built.

I used to also design houses, car/bike race tracks and mazes that used naturally topography instead of walls (cliffs and streams etc).  I even included wheel chair access in most of the mazes (no idea why though - a great idea but I'm not sure of my motivation).

Anyway, my "Gay Venture" stamp album now houses numerous rough and not so rough sketches and designs from my time in UK (drawn on the back of pages from a Detailed Design Specification for an HR system, for British Telecom - a system I was informed a year or so ago is still in operation!) as well as from the last 80s.