Stamping on grave snail-mail service

THE FRIDAY THING:

WHEN was the last time you sent a letter? You know, with Basildon Bond writing paper and an envelope and maybe, if they still make them, a fountain pen (ask your mum or, better still, your grandma).

It has all become part of yesteryear nostalgia, a bit like the post itself in many ways, and I am only looking back to those gentler days in the wake of the news that a first-class postage stamp will soon cost 60p, or 12 shillings (ask your gran again) in old money.

There will be people reading this who will remember when a postage stamp cost a penny ha’penny (ask your gran) but do we get a better service than in days of old, when there were two deliveries a day and post arrived the day after it was posted and before we went out to work — and it always arrived?

That was, needless to say, before the mail service was privatised, turning it like so many other elements of life from a service that responded to people’s needs to a business driven solely by the need to make money. Only it doesn’t. If we didn’t know better, we could be driven to think that the 60p postage stamp was a not very subtle way of killing off the business altogether at a time when emails outnumber snail mail by thousands to one.

Of course we can’t (yet) send a parcel or a package through cyber space but who knows how long it will be before we are sending emails and text messages to Amazon and the like: “Beam it up, postie!”



THERE is, as I know to my cost, no such thing as a free meal. But £250,000 is a bit on the rich side for most of us mere mortals. And which of us would, even if we had that sort of money hidden under the sofa cushions, want to spend it on a meal out with David Cameron, even if he was accompanied by his splendid wife or the Queen or even Princess Kate?

Maybe the original idea behind the Downing Street noshes was to introduce David Cameron to the idea that not everyone in Britain is a toff like him but if it was, it has failed 250,000 times over. Surely Cameron would learn more about Britain and its people with a few chippy teas with ordinary folk like the majority of us than he will entertaining mirror images of himself.

Apparently the toffs who now grace the PM’s dining tables do so in the hope of influencing future Government policy (almost certainly in their own interests and to further their own wealth and ambitions) and most of them will expect to reap rich rewards, richer than £250,000 even, for supporting the Tory party.

I have, needless to say, entertained local politicians and local council officers myself on occasion, usually to an Indian or Chinese buffet lunch with the odd Italian meal (all eaten and paid for in Oldham and not at Williams Towers) but we either took turns to pay or, in some cases, council staff insisted on paying so they could not be accused of accepting gifts from the media (otherwise known as the enemy).

It is a pity that such scruples do not seem to have seeped through to national government circles. Pass the vintage port old bean.



FINAL WORD: There will be sighs of relief in some quarters that what looked like a planning stitch-up (planning applications to build virtually anything, virtually anywhere bypassing the usual scrutiny and going through on the nod, or with a nod and a wink) have at least been put on hold.

But let’s not break out the celebration champagne just yet. We might not be going to cover our green spaces with “sustainable developments” whatever that means but it will leave an awful lot of green spaces for the useless wind farms that pop up like mushrooms in the dark all around us.

The choice may be to have wind farms or new homes in your back garden. You have been warned.