Philately is fun, Josh
This dropped through my letterbox yesterday:
I didn't want to open the envelope. Snail-mail has some advantages.
I want to send Superman stamps! Postage is so much more fun in the US. You can even use your own Flickr photos. I remarked on this to a friend, who promptly pointed out the Royal Mail Smilers scheme. I'm going to start sending more letters.
Not much bookselling during postal strikes
We've sold nine books in the last five days, and of course can't post any of them. I'm a little worried about the two foreign ones - I'm hoping my emails have been understood, or we may be in for some negative feedback. With a bit of luck I could appeal against that, though. I do sympathise with the Royal Mail - I don't know how the hell you cope with losing a monopoly and having other businesses take the markets you use to subsidise non-profit-making areas - but it'd be lovely if they could get it sorted / get bought by the government or something.
(update: just heard the government already own the post office. Not that I don't know what I'm talking about, or anything.)
Laughs from the past week
Helpful Royal Mail, marketing-speak at Philips, and something that must have seemed like a good idea at the time...
and, this morning I drove through this:
Possibly a mistake. My car seems less than chipper. Ho hum.
Royal Mail online stamps
Has anybody used the Royal Mail's online stamp system? Does it work? It seems like it should be great, but I've been trying to buy a first class stamp since lunchtime and it keeps telling me - at the final stage of five - that there's an unspecified problem processing my order. This would be ok, but there's no way to save address information and the damn thing logs me out after fifteen minutes of inactivity. Given the placement of the error message, and that it's lasted all day, it feels like I've tripped a bug rather than caught it at an off-time. Is annoying.
Update: working as of Wednesday, so must just have been a blip.
Huge postal coincidence
I had one of those coincidences happen yesterday at which you'd roll your eyes if it happened on TV.
In early August a friend of mine, who we'll call Miss B, sent me a parcel from her home in Devon. It never arrived, and after a few weeks we decided it must have been lost / taken somewhere along the route. Miss B did what we all do sometimes and realised after posting that she hadn't written a return address on the padded envelope, and as it was sent through the normal post system there wasn't any way to track it.
What had actually happened was this: the parcel arrived at my flat when I was away for a few days. I assume they left a please-pick-up-your-parcel note, but because my block of flats has a communal post table the note must have been lost in a pile of newspapers/leaflets. So after a few weeks the Royal Mail tried to figure out what to do with the parcel. It turns out that the padded envelope was first used by Miss B's mother, who lives in Solihull, and her return address was written on the back. But just a postcode, no house number.
So the Royal Mail took the parcel to Solihull, and tried to work out which house it came from. There was a smudge on the packet that looked like it could begin with a D or a P, so they looked at the names of the residents, chose an address, knocked on the door and asked whether the occupier knew anything about the package. No, says the occupier, but I do know Andrew! The address they'd chosen, from a street of 50 houses, happened to belong to another friend of mine, Miss P, whose mother answered the door and in what must have been a very confusing few seconds figured it all out and took the parcel for me.
I was rather surprised when Miss P handed me the parcel last night, but now I have a very much appreciated Ally McBeal DVD box set - thanks, Miss B!
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
