Ridiculous

I left the house today. It's not something I've done much of recently so I thought I'd give it a spin and see how it worked out. I had to go and collect my prescription and drop off something at the post office. The weather is quite nice so I thought I'd have a mooch around and find something to blip because I love you all; even the bloke at the back who is picking his nose.

While driving around I started thinking about this blip. It was about the decline in telephone boxes as more people carry mobile phones and that then got me to thinking about post boxes and whether they might follow the same trajectory. I was also reminded of a recent story about a group who are trying to document every post box in the country. As a younger bloke I seemed to spend a fair amount of time posting stuff but now it happens so rarely that I was shocked at the price of stamps when I recently purchased some. Today I went in to the post office because it wasn't a bog-standard postal event. 

Much of the communication in which we engage nowadays is mediated by digital technologies. We email and tweet and I understand that you younger folk use microphones and video cameras in some way to chat to each other. So what's left to send in a physical form? Sometimes formal documents need signatures or photographs or such like. Heaven forfend but occasionally we have to find and dust off a chequebook and "send a kite" - a term I first learnt many years ago and which now has almost completely vanished. Some stuff simply has to be written down on paper because it has a different tone or texture or sense than words on a screen but the amount of postal traffic generated in the home must have declined dramatically. As an aside; I've spent part of my working life warning people that a characteristic of the digital medium is permanence, things published online tend to be available forever, but I still privilege marks on paper, dead-tree technology, for some things because it seems to mean more. I wonder how that works? Perhaps it's the nature of physical post which means that it can go on the mantelpiece or on a shelf? Anyway, the reduction in post must prompt some questions about how long it might be before we lose our post boxes - will they go the way of phone boxes? 

Also under threat is doorstep delivery. We already know that the Royal Mail is struggling due to the drop in physical post and incursions by other delivery companies. Will we move to community mailboxes? During my hunt for the link to the news item above I came across a new report about problems with community mailboxes in Ottawa and that articulates with a very funny video which the Queen of Canadaland sent me about weather reports which is well worth a watch! I remember when I lived in an apartment we had mailboxes in the foyer but I think that if I had to go to a mailbox somewhere I'd probably forget and the post would only be collected when a child popped by to see their poor old dad. Of course if we did lose doorstep delivery how would we get to know about local pizza companies or double-glazing or furniture stores having sales?

I hope that this brief glimpse at some of the stuff bubbling around in my head along with song lyrics and dinner menus and cheese and trains helps. For those who care about these things it's Friday tomorrow so that has to be a result!