by David Jones
Is the Royal Mail having a laugh? I've got four letters to post and it's going to cost me nearly £2.
The cost of a first class stamp is now a whopping 46p after a 5p increase - the latest in a series of inflation-busting rises.
FORTY SIX PENCE, that's nearly 10 shillings (50p) in old money. Outrageous. Ten shillings when I was a kid was a small fortune. I can still recall clutching the crisp 10 shilling note my parents gave me when we went on holiday one year. It was a week's spending money.
Okay, inflation has taken its toll over 55 years but 10 shillings to post a letter? Still seems outrageous to me.
Letter writing is becoming a ridiculously expensive business. No wonder Royal Mail now appears to be in a state of terminal decline.
It's not as though the escalation in the quality of service has matched the rapid escalation in the price of a stamp.
In the late 19th century, there were between six and 12 deliveries a day in London. It was possible to write a letter and receive a reply the same day. Unbelievable. No mail vans then. Just horses and carts.
Yes, Royal Mail, I know that vastly fewer items were posted in those Victorian days but despite all the advances in technology, things have got worse, not better.
Royal Mail can't even manage two deliveries a day now. Royal Mail's rebuttal argument is that no private sector company will deliver a letter, posted in Cornwall, to the Isle of Skye for 46p, so better the devil you know, Mr Customer. But then most letters are not delivered to the Isle of Skye.
In our street, like everyone else, we now only have one mail delivery a day and that arrives at any old time. One day it plops through the letter box at 9.30am and the next it mysteriously fails to arrive until 2pm. Which begs another question: What do postmen do in the mornings when they do not deliver the mail until 2pm?
Presumably, they have to spend the whole morning sorting the mail because it has arrived five hours later than usual.
And if they do, does that mean they got up at the crack of dawn, five hours before they needed to, ready for a 9.30am delivery of mail that hadn't yet arrived?
Or does Royal Mail have some sort of automated posties' alarm call?: "Have a lie-in this morning, Charlie. No sign of the mail for Kent yet. It's somewhere between Milton Keynes and Tunbridge Wells. We'll give you another call when it turns up. Go back to sleep."
This conundrum creates another mystery: If Royal Mail knows, roughly, how many items of mail are posted each day, why is there such a large variance in delivery times?
There's no logic to it, either. Our post is sometimes late when it's a beautiful morning, or early when the weather's lousy.
If anyone out there knows the answer to my questions, drop me a line. On second thoughts, send me an email. It'll get here immediately and cost virtually nothing.
There's no denying that letters have a special quality, which cannot be matched by the starkness of an email.
We've all felt a tinge of excitement or apprehension as we tear open a letter from an unknown sender. Or a sinking feeling if the letter is an instantly recognisable brown envelope from the tax man.
If the cost of stamps continues to rise well above the rate of inflation, then sending a letter, especially first class, will become a luxury for many.
I am aware Royal Mail is not a charity. It has to be financially viable, but it is in danger of pricing itself out of business. And there are plenty of private sector predators snapping at its heels.
We should not forget that not even national institutions are sacrosanct. Remember Woolworths? We thought Woolies would be there for ever, didn't we?
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