Snail Mail

I write a lot of letters and send a lot of birthday and Christmas cards. I like the handwritten word. 

I tend to decorate my envelopes too.

One of my oldest and dearest friends died last year. She had moved to Canada when she was in her early 20s and we had corresponded ever since. I have hundreds of letters from her. There are doubtless some emails also buried somewhere in amongst all the other thousands of personal emails I've sent and received over the years. When she died I was asked to do a eulogy. To jog my memory back 50 or so years I started re-reading the letters. Obviously I only scanned most of them but it was a very comforting few days that I spent with them in front of me.

I also have all the correspondence with my Mum (a wonderful letter writer) when I moved to Lewis in the '70s. The letters I wrote were returned to me when she and Dad gave up their home to go and live with my brother. I'd kept all hers so it was good to have the 'whole picture'.

My brother and I communicate frequently by post.

In 2019 I wrote 290 missives ranging from 10 page letters, to 2 page note-cards: mostly the latter. Then there were all the birthday, get-well, sympathy and Christmas cards: probably totalling nearly a couple of hundred.

So I probably buy around 450 to 500 postage stamps a year. Apart from Christmas cards and some birthday cards to people in the UK all my stamps are First Class or abroad - usually New Zealand or USA. 

This country has an excellent postal service provided by the Royal Mail. Mail is delivered 6 days a week to the door of almost every address in the country at a single uniform rate regardless of location. So a letter posted on the Isle of Wight will be delivered First Class to me on the Isle of Lewis 560 miles (900k)  away in a straight line (764 miles by road) usually the next day for the sum of 70p. It costs the same for me to post a letter to Stornoway 7 miles away. I may be wrong but I don't think anywhere else in the world provides such a universal one-price service regardless of price.

One problem facing the royal mail is the fact that the lucrative low cost services are provided in the cities by competitors who only provide services within relatively small lucrative catchment areas eg within central London. This leaves the Royal Mail providing the high cost services at a price they must also charge in the lucrative areas.

On 23 March Royal Mail will increase their prices yet again. A First Class 20g letter will go up from 70p to 76p a rise of over 8%. 

As we send fewer and fewer letters because we use electronic means of communication for personal and business and as prices increase and contribute to the declining use my question is simply "How much longer will we have a universal letter postal service." If we don't use it we'll lose it.

Rural Postal Services

As, I suspect, is happening all around the world small rural and urban post offices are closing down as more services (such as pensions) are paid into bank accounts, use of snail mail diminishes and private companies compete for the lucrative parts of the traditional business (such as parcels and even urban delivery of letters). The UK remains, I think, one of the few (and perhaps the only) country where the Royal Mail is charged with delivering mail everywhere in the country and, generally, to the door of the recipient's dwelling six days a week and at a standard rate of postage.

I do wonder how long such a wonderful service can continue.

As recently as a couple of years ago there were two sub post offices within a couple of miles of my house. Now the nearest one is in Stornoway 7 miles away. However, in Stornoway, there are many post office services available at at least one of the two sub post offices (the main post office keeps more conventional hours) from 7am until 11pm 6 days a week. I've never come across service times like that before although I presume that it happens elsewhere.

I recently discovered, too, that we now have a mobile post office which comes around to various rural locations on a regular basis as well. It visits Lower Bayble twice a week on a Monday and Tuesday for an hour on each day.

Add to that the fact that I can post a letter at a post box about 700m from the house which is emptied at 10.30am 6 days a week and I have absolutely no cause for anything other than praise for our postal service.

My local post box (Photo thanks to my brother).