46. A letter to Terry ✒️ #6

A deadline for using up stamps, and the tricky art of ‘lett-iquette’.

Dear Terry,

How’s tricks? I wonder if you’re surprised to be reading a real-life letter rather than a Substack one, given that we’ve only ever corresponded in that way or e-mail before?

You can read Terry’s last letter to me here.
This post you’re reading is the latest in my ‘Letters to Terry’ series. It’s the edited text of a letter about a recent move to add barcodes to British stamps, which I’d written in proper ink and sent to Terry via Royal Mail earlier this week.
And this is why:

I’ve been going through all the stamps we’ve got kicking around here at home and work, and realised that the ‘use them or lose them’ deadline is nigh. One of the stamps I’ve found is ineligible to be exchanged for a barcoded one, as it’s not attached to its proper backing – so, as it’s a bonus stamp, one I hadn’t accounted for, I’m excited to be using it to write to someone I don’t habitually write real-life letters to.
And that’s you, Terry!

Who better a recipient than Terry for this bonus stamp?

So, what’s this whole stamp debacle even about? Contrary to my initial conclusion that it’s to swiftly clear multiple tiny print-outs of our dear departed Queen’s face from the nation’s office pinboards in favour of new ones featuring the King, it’s actually just a ‘streamlining’ exercise. Yes, Royal Mail has adopted the barcode!

Image taken from royalmail.com website

(Terry, having first been used in Britain in 1979, the barcode is very nearly as old as I am – I wonder why it’s taken so long for our postal service to adopt? Were they reluctant to wrestle with such technology before it had been tested for a full four decades? I’m sure with your relationship with your local sorting office being so rosy – as you’d described in an earlier letter to me – you’re in an excellent position to find out. Do let me know!)

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Looking at the piece of paper on which I’m scrawling I’m wondering if I can even call this a ‘letter’. What is the ‘lett-iquette’ of using a sheet of A4 squared refill pad (bought at the start of lockdown for my brief dalliance with brushing up my French – squared paper is just the thing for writing down columns of vocab and tables of verb conjugations) rather than actual writing paper?

In the old days Dad would use a pad of ‘Basildon Bond’: bright, white laid paper half (or less) the size of this page. It had come with a loose sheet printed with bold, black lines, the idea being to slip that under the page that you’re writing on in order for your written lines to be straight. My own writing paper choices would all be unbranded, flimsy also-rans: more Brooke Bond¹ than Basildon.

And what about notelets and the like? A handwritten note on a notelet is a note, right, rather than a letter? Or is it still a letter?

Is the ‘letter’ nomenclature specific to length, do you think? To qualify for letter status, does the number of words have to exceed a hundred, two hundred, a thousand?

And what about postcards? A postcard used as a postcard – by which I mean it’s got a picture of Grimsby/Newquay/the Cutty Sark on the front, the recipient’s address on the right-hand side of the reverse and some handwritten report of dire weather and lack of decent tourist entertainment on the left – is definitely not a letter, but, well, a postcard.

Photo by Héctor J. Rivas on Unsplash

But – and I know I’m pushing the envelope (yeah, deliberate pun, my bad!) – what if you were to write a missive across the whole postcard, including the part intended for the address, and then put it into an envelope to send? Would that render it a letter?

Naked postcards – no, not those saucy seaside ones, Terry; I mean postcards sent without an envelope, as they’re meant to be – offer potential for awkwardness. I once sent one to a university friend one summer, and she rang me on receipt to complain that her mother had not only read it but had subjected her to an unwanted (and, I might just say, unwarranted, for she was a nice girl) grilling about her love life. All I’d done had been to mention by name a male mutual friend, and somehow this had led to all sorts of difficult family discussions. You know, family discussions. That kind. Oops.

‘Please don’t send me a postcard again, Rebecca! Or, if you do, at least use an envelope!’

This postcard I received from my folks on their trip to the Falkland Islands had me in fear for their lives:

Stanley, Mon 25th Jan
Having a great time. Full on all the time with many stairs. Cold outside, hot inside so logistical nightmare! Penguins galore with much more to come. Diversion here due to medical evacuation! Off to South Georgia next. Boat dwarfed by cruise ships so about the right size!!
All our love, APs² XXXX

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Okay, so ‘penguins’ had caught my attention already, but ‘medical evacuation’???? And no elaboration? What had happened? Were they okay? Was Mum okay – this postcard was, after all, in Dad’s handwriting!

With trembling fingers I took a snap of the words and sent it straight to my brother. ‘Have you heard from the APs? Are they alive?’

He told me not to worry, but we were both nevertheless nervous as we awaited our parents’ return. In time, Mum rang to check in.

‘We’re home!’
‘Thank God! MEDICAL EVACUATION???? We got Dad’s postcard! Are you okay?’
Silence.
And then:

‘Oh yes, broken hip. Fellow passenger.’

Dad had his postcard-writing licence revoked with immediate effect unless such future correspondence were run past Mum before sending.

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Back to the stamps, Terry: I find myself wondering whether postcard printers are going to upscale their products in light of their having to accommodate new barcoded stamps approximately the size of a teabag. There’ll literally only be space for ‘Wish you were here, please remember to feed the cat’, rather than a blow-by-blow account of Auntie Sheila and Uncle Doug’s entire mini break in Bath. Have they thought about that?

Well, look at me getting all carried away! Here we are on page three already, and in my state of Sunday morning post-Archers-omnibus-listening idleness I had intended to use just the one sheet of paper for this letter ramble obviously not a postcard is it even a letter if it’s not on writing paper? missive. How very unlike me not to know when to shut up. 😉

Well, I’ve got to make it worth the stamp.

I’ve printed the ‘Stamp Swap Out Form’ I found on the Royal Mail website: although it tells me that I have until 31st January to use up any non-barcoded stamps, further research has enlightened me that there is an additional grace period of six months. Seems I needn’t have been in such a hurry to use up your stamp!

It surprised me that there’s no deadline for exchanging unused non-barcoded stamps. This means that I could hold onto them for another 25 years, and if I then can’t get a decent price for them in the ‘old stamps’ category on eBay I could send them to Royal Mail to swap for the latest new ones. Could work, right?

Still, I’ve already made the effort to count them all up. It seems we haven’t been writing enough letters, because between home, work and my mother-in-law’s stash I’m sending in:

25 x standard first class letter stamps
7 x standard second class letter stamps
4 x large first class letter stamps

The stamp that’s not eligible to be swapped – the one I’m using to send this to you – is a more expensive large letter one, meaning I could put these pages into a much bigger envelope. But no, I’m keeping things simple, unlike our friends at Royal Mail. Why did they start messing around with ‘standard’ and ‘large’ in the first place? Does it sound to you as if they need to throw yet more factors into the system?

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this real-life letter, Terry – a bit of a change to our normal practice! I wonder if you took the time to admire the stamp, because the next one’ll have a barcode, you know…

All the very best, as always,

Rebecca

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If you enjoyed this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published as usual on Saturday. See you then!

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this limited-edition series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page.

Or just click below to read both sides of our correspondence in one place:

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

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1. Brooke Bond is a tea bag manufacturer.

2. APs = ‘Aged Parents’.
Every postcard Dad sent me during his career as a pilot was signed ‘AP’.
Our parents would read us a chapter of an Arthur Ransome book every night at bedtime, and in ‘Coot Club’ the twins Port and Starboard called their much-loved father ‘AP’, short for ‘aged parent’. Both in the book and in our own family life it is absolutely a term of endearment!
Ransome is best known for having written ‘Swallows and Amazons’.