Going postal

I admire the post office enormously. I can write a letter or wrap a parcel, shove it into the mailbox and within a couple of days the said item will be delivered to it's target address. I can order stuff online of an afternoon and have things delivered the next day, and that I think is marvellous. What is more the service is cheap.

When i was a boy, I collected postage stamps; I still have them, and if I can be bothered to look through them I can still recall buying some of them and sticking them into my album. Faces of the young queen, countries that no longer exist, leaders long since dead or deposed are all represented in those tiny scraps of coloured paper. To some people those bits of paper may be worth something in monetary terms, but I don't suppose that I will ever get around to having them valued or putting them up for sale. It was a phase and like all phases it was pretty short lived.

In those days people wrote letters and sent each other cards via the Royal Mail, there was a lot of it and deliveries, even out in the wilds where I lived, were twice daily. Every village had a post office and many towns had several. Now of course we write very little. i think I have forgotten how to use a fountain pen and for me at least letter writing has become a thing of the past. I email of course and pick up the phone from time to time, should I wish to talk to someone.

Despite all of the competition, the mail continues to work, and work well. Oh yes people complain that there are few post offices and that the cost of posting a letter keeps going up, but it is still a small price to pay for what you get. Having said that, there have been no deliveries for a couple of days, I guess that the mailmen are all snowed in too.