Pursuing a hobby, listening to classical music, and going for long walks are the secret to William Hall's vitality, he explains.
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The 89 year-old man from Merimbula on the NSW Far South Coast is the kind of old world gentleman of yesteryear.
And his somewhat unlikely hobby is his incredible collection of postcards from history - including more than 300 original postcards from World War I.
His total collection amounts to more than 8000, some postcards preserved in albums and numbered, others still sitting in boxes waiting to be sorted through.
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The hobby was inherited from his father, but after his father's death it became William's own passion.
When he inherited the postcards he said they were disorderly and "just in piles", but that changed when he started to collate them.
Over the years he has been able to find long lost matches of postcards sent between lovers.
In fact, many of his favourites were from World War I with handwritten love letters in perfect cursive, showing correspondence between lovers separated by the battlefield.
William is a self confessed romantic.
The first he brings up, his favourite, was the story between two "sweethearts" - Eric an Australian digger and Mathilde - likely his French girlfriend.
"An old fashioned romance," he called it.
He has revived the story of the two lovers by reading between the lines of their postcards.
"They must have met in France, they probably got together and she fell in love with him - it's a love story but it's a very sad story," he said while holding up the hand embroidered postcard - the largest of its kind in his collection.
"They wrote beautiful words to each other.
"She wrote on one of the postcards 'don't forget me'," he said.
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A sad story he thought, because it was more than 100 years ago and more than likely ended in pain - knowing the reality of how many men died in the trenches during World War I.
"I don't know what happened to them, but I get very sad reading it - I'm a very sentimental person."
William managed to marry up the postcard to another with a woman on its front by identifying the same signature and handwriting on both.
"I would say that picture is of her," he said.
Although he hasn't been able to chase up exactly who Eric and Mathilde were or what happened to them, he was able to match up a few postcards in the collection of a Scottish emigrant by the name of Robert Mair.
William has a few postcards with hand written correspondence on the back, newspaper clippings, and some printed information he received about the soldier from the Australian War Memorial.
"He came from Scotland at the turn of the century and went into business, he had two brothers, but he volunteered for the first world war, in the ANZACs," said William.
"He had a sweetheart, a girlfriend I think.
"He sent her a postcard to People's Palace on Pitt Street Sydney. He was writing to her from France."
Unfortunately Robert was killed on the battlefield when he was just 30 years of age.
"That's his cross in France," said William of a postcard showing a white cross in a field of burial sites for Diggers who lost their lives fighting overseas.
William tried to track down his family in Scotland by writing to the local newspaper where he was born, but had not received correspondence back.
"You can't really write to a newspaper in Scotland and find information about people due to privacy these days. In the olden days you probably could," he said.
As he retells the stories of lost lovers, he recounts his own love story - "married for 60 years" - with his wife now in the nursing home just up the hill from his unit.
"Sometimes when I'm sitting watching the telly, I turn to the chair over there and say 'did you see that?' - forgetting she's not there anymore.
"It's hard after you've been living with someone for the last 60 years," he said.
Among his collection were also postcards from Germany, France, America, and even Russia. Some with hand written letters to loved ones in their mother tongues - leaving William wishing he could understand them.
"A lot of them have writing on them, I never get sick of them, I go through them a lot," he said
"They're all done in pencil, there were no biros then," he said.
Other postcards in the collection showed humour from the soldiers, despite the circumstances.
He told the story of a soldier who had clearly been wounded on the battlefield and had written that he was recovering in hospital, probably in England.
He wrote that he probably wouldn't have been writing so much "but the postage is free".
At the bottom of the postcard the soldier asks - "how is the canary?"
"It sounds to me like he's sitting in a hospital somewhere, wounded, and he's asking about a bird. I found it quite humorous.
"They've all got a story attached to them," he said.
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