Village people

There are many good reasons to read Dickens.  His novels are a tremendous source of fabulous names, any of which are useful as an alias during that tricky time at the start of a relationship when you don’t want to commit too much, like giving your real name, such a period usually lasting between three weeks and five years.  Ironically, given the names Dickens usually ascribed his characters, if you do find a girl who is apparently willing to hook up with you and chance going through life as ‘Mrs Fizzyclotter’, then that gal’s a keeper.
Another reason is to see the changes that have happened to England, for instance the description of a walk from the centre of London, across some fields, to reach the village of Camden.  My understanding is that there are now no fields between the centre of London and Camden now, although there are apparently a shedload of 4x4s, despite that lack of agriculture.
The march towards modernity has seen suburbs swell to encapsulate villages and it’s a curious phenomenon when new neighbourhoods flow around an established village, leaving it untouched.
A standard issue village comes with a church, pub, post office and an idiot.  Ducking stool and pond are optional, but essential is the villager mentality, typified by rightly despising anyone who lives beyond the speed limit and ‘Britain in bloom’ signs that mark the village borders.  This is a mind-set that, if we’re being generous, we could say originated in the age of the Plague, when anyone from outside the village was treated with suspicion and a stranger with a cough was stoned to death on the spot, with disinfected rocks.
Villagers jealously guard their status, which is why the latest missive from the Post Office, or post office inc. or post office ltd. or whatever the hell it’s now called, was an interesting and provocaative proposal to grant the name of the village to the wider area.  We are assured that this will not have any effect on post codes or the actual postal address, it’s just that we can all, officially, add another line to our address, but that line is the name of the local village.
Mainly, those that don’t live in the village view this as a good thing as it means a couple of things; a posher address and a couple of grand on your house value. 
For the villagers, it’s most probably seen as the dilution of identity. 
For anyone who lives outside the village who has aspirations of one day living in the village itself, it’s nothing short of an outrage, as the correct way to obtain a village address is to, you know, actually move there, rather than tick a box.
I’ve lived in villages, proper villages, they have a pub at each end, a church in the middle, a small store with a post office counter at the back and a green.  (Never saw an idiot though, although my neighbours at the time did mention one).  They also have fields at the end of the road between you and a farm and the next village, which you never visit, because those plague-carrying bastards can’t be trusted.
There are also hamlets.  Typically a few houses that have sort of huddled together for company, these are communities that once simultaneously aspired to village status but didn’t want to spoil the ‘character’ of the place but now, like everyone, just want broadband.
The vote will most probably swing in the direction of granting the name of the village to the surrounding postal area, through the simple mechanics that one only takes action, that is, fills out a form, if one objects. 
It’s one thing to object, it’s another to act on that objection, and it’s another thing entirely to, as is required, put that objection in words.  The only people with the confidence to scrawl ‘they’re just not our sort!’ on a post card and send it off are the villagers, who are of course outnumbered by those who want to be villagers, or who can’t be arsed.
By the way, if you can’t be arsed about the name of where you live, you’re not a villager.

Post haste

Pub quiz question.  What was the biggest Post Office robbery in history? 
Answer: when the government flogged it for far less than it was worth.
The Post Office used to occupy not just a special place on the high street, but also a special place in the British psyche, in particular, in that peculiar part of the psyche dedicated to nostalgia, which appears to be a substantial part judging by, for instance, the amount of telly programming time and endless bloody internet space given over to, for instance, recollections about kids programming in the seventies (both sweet and, more recently, sinister) and on-line conversations about some shared imagined past, most of it revolving around crisps (which is ridiculous, there was more to the seventies and Monster Munch, there were also the delicious ‘bones’, a salt ‘n’ vinegar flavoured corn snack so intense it made you feel odd).
Anyone looking at images of the seventies, documented on early video and Polaroid film, might come away thinking that the decade was mostly a brownish yellow, like the sepia of nostalgia for the man-made age.  Having lived through the seventies I can confirm that, brilliant blue skies of scorching summers apart, they were mostly brown and yellow, the exception being food in colours not found in nature, resulting in the sort of hyperactivity in kids that surely contributed to the popularity of disco and ‘the double deckers.’
Rural sub-post offices of the era were usually staffed by the sort of woman with a book of first class stamps under the counter to her left, and a double-barrelled shotgun under the counter to her right.  One of the benefits of the man made fabrics so popular at the time, and in particular the municipal carpets that typified the age, is that after an attempted stick-up, they were easy to scrape bits of villain off, as well as being remarkably stain-resistant.
The true age of nostalgia for the post office is further back, black and white rather than corduroy sepia, and of course centres around ‘Night Mail’, the film featuring poetry by Betjeman and, of course, iconic images such as steaming trains, shrieking whistles, and a carriage that was a mobile sorting office, with post office workers standing up busily sorting letters, wondering when the hell post codes are going to be invented or at least decent penmanship made mandatory in schools, and the mail bags being swung out for collection or dispatch from the moving train. 
These days of course standing on trains is a result of overcrowding rather than occupation, and the practice of collecting a sack full of letters from a pole at 80mph spectacularly fails every health and safety standard known to modern man.  And in the age of colour film, we communicate by electronic means and the importance of the mail is perhaps diminished. 
Maybe that’s why there was barely a murmur of dissent when the Post Office was sold.  Possibly it could only ever be privatised in the age of Farcebook and Blether.
There remains an affection for the postie him or herself, because you can’t help but admire anyone who struggles through the snow to deliver your Boden catalogue.  Of course, the last great act of public affection for the Post Office was the reaction to their painting certain post boxes gold in recognition of Olympic success in 2012. 
The new, privatised Post Office has declined to repeat this for the athletes who won gold in the 2014 winter Olympics, the predictable result being the guerrilla golding of certain post boxes by proud locals. 
Quite right too. 
The Post Office may no longer belong to the people, but our environment does and if some company wants to have part of its infrastructure stuck on our streets, it should show some respect and get gilding.

Team GPB

The post box. Iconic, a masterpiece of design and the start of a journey for letters and cards and post-cards that bring joy when they eventually fall onto the welcome mat of their intended recipient. And red. Not just red but Red, post box red, heritage red, institution red.

Not any more, in a stroke of paint and absolute genius, the Post Office is painting one post box in the home town of each British Olympic champion gold. They look stunning, more stunning still is that such has been the success of Team GB that the Post Office are reportedly running low on gold paint.

Three things must immediately happen.

Somebody will have to be the first person to visit all the golden post boxes and post a letter in each one.

This will then be the Golden Post Box Challenge. Like Monroe bagging or acquiring STDs you can eke this activity out for years if you so wish but records could also be set in doing them all in the quickest time, by public transport. I can already see the need for at least three different guide books and also a book that you get stamped every time you post a letter from a GPB. Purists will wish to visit them in the Order in which medals were won.

Finally a celebrity, preferably a comedian such as Al Murray, needs to front a television series where he visits each GPB. The format will either be Al on a bicycle wearing a flying helmet and taking a sideways look at whatever town he's visiting, or Al on a tandem wearing a flying helmet with the Olympian in question on the back and hearing Their Story. The flying helmet is, however, crucial.

Postcard from Norfolk – Holme-Next-The-Sea

An entire day spent in the cottage. That's right, given that we have endless beaches, shopping opportunities and not one but two enthusiast run steam railways within easy reach, we decide to spend the day in the cottage.

This is, in part, due to a new mania for jigsaw puzzles, or rather, one particular jigsaw puzzle that we took on holiday. I've never really seen the point of jigsaw puzzles, if one likes a picture, I can't see why having to assemble it from a thousand different components adds to the enjoyment. As an act of creation for an artwork, it seems to have all of the frustrations of actually painting something, without the benefit of that past time being a legitimate excuse to study naked women (although one can stretch this too far I guess, as having a pad and pencil is no defence after being discovered wedged into a locker in a woman's changing room at the gym).

Of course, after clicking the second piece into place and confidently predicting 'I can do this in an hour', the competitive juices start to flow and that gaming see-saw of frustration/accomplishment/frustration/accomplishment that has made Nintendo and others an awful lot of money takes over.

I have learned to greatly admire the elegance of the jigsaw. This one is of a painting of London, looking along the Thames. There are famous bridges and famous buildings and flags and cabs and red busses. It's rather marvellous to place the Union flag in the right place, and oddly satisfying to fit together four pieces of uniform blue sky.

So the day was spent gently clicking. And listening to albums. It's been years since I have listened to an album. Back in the days before the iTunes Store allowed you to cherry pick good tracks off of albums, iTunes let you build playlists. Before that one could use the track select on CDs to play the same track over and over - 'Low' by REM about 147 times if you had just broken up with somebody was I think the standard against which all other 'just one more time' plays were judged. But before that to select a track that was not track one, side one or two, meant carefully lifting and placing the stylus on the record, and who had the patience for that?

Tape counters? Yea, right, who had the energy and skill to whizz the tape back and forth looking at a counter? No, it was lift and play or nothing.

So it was really refreshing to listen to entire albums, a real luxury.

Finished the jiggy at half one in the morning.

During the day there was activity. The cottage is reached by a gravel road that runs on to a bird watching point, and there was a steady scrunch of bird watchers going back and forth, that intensified around six and at dusk (dawn and seek being the best time to watch birds as they are at their most active, six being a time everyone is out of work and doing a bit of birding before heading home).

We, meanwhile, we're busy watching the birds in the back garden, when we were not making tea, puzzling or bickering about who's choice it was to select the next album. The main residents seemed to be a pheasant and his harem, who spent the day lazily wandering around, waiting for the next pear to fall from the tree in the back garden, and some sort of sea bird that was so large that when it perched on top of the shed, I was simultaneously worried about whether the thing would keep standing, and excited about cornering the market in kindling.

There was also much excitement at the arrival of the post man, who dropped off letters at the house next door, racing along the gravel road in a manner that suggested he had a crash helmet, sponsorship ('Royal Mail' was written on the side if his van) and a bloke next to him bellowing 'left, right, easy left, hard right, fuuuuuuuuuucccccccck-tree! in Norwegian.