Are you a Millionaire winner? Prizes for followers!

A few weeks ago we realised that this blog was rapidly approaching it's 1,000,000 blog-views milestone, and we promised prizes when we reached that mark.

Unless you were online at the time, and watching, you wouldn't know that it actually happened at 4.06 am UK time on 17 September.  We know that because we had an email from Adrian whose 7-month-old baby had woken him up and, well what else do you do when the baby wakes up?  You pick up the baby, give him a bottle, go online and check your mail, do some eBay bidding, and check out the Norvic Philatelics blog because you know that you might just see the click over!

We knew when we first mentioned prizes that Google's statistics don't show us who is online, so we can't tell who else might have been around at the time.  So we decided on a random draw from all the blog and twitter followers.  (Excluding family members, of course, in accordance with normal practice.)

But what of the prizes?  As you know I've always said that the blog is only as good as the information we get.  A great deal comes from official Royal Mail sources, but there are very many contributions - either by email or comments - from readers (collectors and dealers) who let us know of their finds so that we can alert collectors worldwide.  We at Norvic are very grateful to all of you.

And we are also very grateful to Royal Mail Stamps and Collectibles for providing the major prize in this draw, which is a complete set of 2013 stamps in the hard-back year book !!!  A big thank you to the people in Edinburgh and London for this gesture.

2nd Prize:
Complete set of 34 Great Britain Paralympic Gold Medal miniature sheets.

3rd Prize: £15 voucher to spend on our shops

4th Prize: Royal Mail 'Seahorses' Facsimile Pack issued September 2013

5th Prize: "Norfolk Posts and Personalities" 60 page all-colour A4 book on Norfolk, the postal service, including Norfolk people on stamps, and interviews with stamp designers from Norfolk.

We're now beginning the process of contacting the people whose names/IDs were drawn.  If we can't make contact after a reasonable time then we will move on to the next one, until we have responses from 5 people.  Then we will send out the prizes - the first prize cannot be sent before 5 November when the Year Book officially goes on sale.

Thanks again, and look out for a message on twitter or via the blogger interface.  Remember to reply immediately to be sure of getting your prize.

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