There have been a lot of complaints about the ‘eccentric’ service provided by Royal Mail.
Householders and businesses report that some weekdays no post arrives, which is disappointing for anyone expecting a date-specific birthday or anniversary card.
More importantly, they could be awaiting a letter from a local health board confirming a vital hospital appointment.
Then, what happens the following day?
A big bundle of envelopes arrives, all posted on different days, sometimes up to a week before. That’s a bit of a haphazard system, hardly suitable for the 21st Century, is it?
And it wouldn’t be so bad if stamps cost 50 pence.
But at the time of writing, the cost of a first-class stamp is . . . gulp! . . . £1.80, while a second-class stamp will set you back 91p
If their prices increase before I finish this article, I’ll let you know.
I did some research, so you don’t have to, and discovered to my surprise that second-class stamps were introduced in 1968, at the ‘fag end’ of the swinging 60s.
The two-tier postal service was created to ease the pressure on postmen and women and people working in busy sorting offices.
Back then, of course, there was no e-mail, texts or WhatsApps.
It was still a time when people wrote letters.
It was rare for someone to receive a letter and not sit down soon after with some Basildon Bond paper and a fountain pen, to write a letter in response.
If you had friends or relatives abroad, you could communicate using thin air mail paper that you posted in air mail envelopes.
You can still buy them, but receiving an airmail envelope with a foreign stamp attached was quite an event back then.
Presumably, it was industrious letter writers who created the pressure postal staff were under.
In which case, as the Royal Mail tells us only a small minority of the population write letters today, the pressure on staff has eased.
So why doesn’t Royal Mail scrap first and second-class stamps and issue one generic stamp?
Answers on a postcard please . . .
With a second-class stamp!