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I am not giving you anything

By Elsabe Smit

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Published: 25Nov2008
Word count: 988
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Anybody who loves reading and especially authors know how important a catching title is.

You can think up the most appropriate and most descriptive title, only to discover - yet again - that there is nothing new under the sun and someone has beaten you to it, or you can have a title that you think is perfect, but nobody else does.

And let's face it, when we buy or select books to read, we in fact select titles and authors before we select the contents. The titles first catch our eyes, and then we explore further.

There is actually an annual prize that is awarded by the Bookseller Magazine for the oddest book title of the year. The first winner of the prize in 1978 was the title "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice" (University of Tokyo Press)

Here are some winners from other years:

"Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts"

"How to Avoid Huge Ships"

"Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw"

"Weeds in a Changing World"

"Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service"

"Living With Crazy Buttocks"

"People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It"

"The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification"

Now the top prize has been allocated to the 1996 winner, "Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers"

A cancellation number is a postal marking applied to a stamp or stationery indicating that the item has been used. We can see the cancellation details on the mail we receive, because a print on the stamp indicates where and when the item was mailed, and we cannot use the same stamp for other mail.

It appears that Greek rural postmen each had a cancellation number that they applied to incoming mail to cancel the stamps before distributing the mail. The prize winner book tells the human stories behind each of the cancellation numbers.

Cancellation number 87236 was the number used by rural postman, Dimitri Vassilikos, to cancel the stamps on all mail routed through the Elassona post office in Northern Thessalonika.

He died at the age of 87. After his death, seventeen 17 bags of undistributed letters were discovered in his attic. It transpired that Dimitri sat at his kitchen table all day, drinking ouzo (a traditional Greek alcoholic drink) and cancelling the stamps on the letters.

But then he never actually delivered even one of the letters in his life. He simply added the mail items to other bags of mail that he had been storing in his attic. As a result the inhabitants of Elassona are known to this day as "the isolated ones". Not even Readers' Digest could get past Dimitri Vassilikos, it seems.

Why would a postman do something so outrageous? Because he feared that his worthless sons would discover the hidden mail in the attic, steam off the stamps and use the proceeds to go to the Greek island of Mykonos. These young men seemed to be quite attracted to Mykonos and would do anything to get there. I wonder how many used stamps with the number 87236 they would have had to sell to get the money to go to Mykonos.

We think the old man was crazy, but don't we do the same in different ways? Think of the crockery and cutlery and bed linen that are hidden away and only taken out to impress visitors. As if we are not good enough to use beautiful or valuable stuff every day.

And how about the clothes that we only wear on special occasions? Often the special occasions are so far apart that the clothes "shrink" while in the wardrobe and then we need to buy new clothes, only to wear them once and hide them away again anyway. What a waste.

In the culture that I grew up in, there was the justification that you use beautiful things rather than leave them for the second wife to enjoy. Somehow there must be some external reason for attaching value to yourself, even if it is by comparing yourself to an unknown person that may or may not be in the future of your beloved partner.

We do the same with our emotions. Our love is precious, and therefore we are reluctant to tell people we love them until we know the end of our time here is near or there is some crisis that justifies us using the words. We do not understand that love breeds love, and we prefer to hide it away in the attic so that others cannot abuse it.

How often do we praise our children or others around us that do well or achieve something? No, we rather withhold the praise because we do not want them to become vain or conceited. Why would we encourage people to break down the boundaries around them and explore their full ability? If we do anything like that, we will just have to dig up more of the praise and encouragement that we have been hoarding, and that will leave us with nothing. Will it?

Positive emotions like love and praise and encouragement may multiply slower than the more heated emotions of jealousy and resentment, but positive emotions multiply for ever, while negative emotions only multiply until we see the damage they do and wake up and choose not to feel them.

So it is quite OK and in fact a very good idea to take all the best things out of the wardrobes and cupboards and our hearts and use them every day to make our world a beautiful place. The more we use the best things, the more wonderful things will come into our lives, because we are worthy of the best.

Elsabe Smit is the author of the soul-touching collection of short stories, A Tapestry of Life and of the blog http://www.mypurpleblog.com , Spiritual interpretations of everyday life.

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