The beleaguered Royal Mail is losing the last of its natural allies: stamp collectors. John Baron, chairman of the Association of British Philatelic Societies, said it had "killed the market" while Alec MacGuire, a collector from Surrey, thinks it's "making Britain a laughing stock of the philatelic world". When you get this sort of response to a series of stamps depicting picturesque British landmarks, you know you've lost your touch.
So what is the philatelists' complaint? Cumulative adhesive poisoning? Respiratory problems caused by repeated sneeze-suppression? Hinge-licker's tongue? In this case, no. They're angry that the Mail (Royal, not Daily – although, since the abolition of the second post, it is only daily) is issuing too many new stamps. It would beggar most collectors to keep up. They're cynical about the motives: "Doubtless once the privatisation process has gone ahead, the number of issues will increase still further," the Great Britain Philatelic Society's website administrator responded drily (that's hinge-licker's tongue for you).
But who is going to want to buy Royal Mail now? The manifest desperation of its current owner to sell isn't much of a draw. All recent governments have seemed keen to flog it, very much as if there'd been any kind of public clamour for this to happen. We live in the era of determinedly selling public assets and then carrying on as if the consequences aren't annoying – as if we haven't just endured a sodden Easter weekend with months of hosepipe ban ahead and no one at whom to scream "Why didn't you dig more sodding reservoirs, you incompetent scum?!", other than various consortia of international investors. There's no government department to blame for the shortage. No feeling that the cash saved by failing to improve the infrastructure is at least money the British public has retained rather than economies made at our collective expense by unaccountable strangers.
As if the choice of electricity and gas suppliers that we currently enjoy were an inviting menu rather than two depressing options: waste your time or waste your money. An unappetising prospect imposed on us to sustain the free market ideology of a dying 90s Tory government and perpetuated by its New Labour successors out of fear of looking like enemies of commerce if they did anything too sensible.
As if the railways aren't more over-priced and ineptly run than under British Rail but with the added irritation of each line having a different logo and platitudinous slogan plastered all over the filthy, outdated, sluggish rolling stock – a desecration more indecent than the filthiest graffito. First Great Western is the most infuriating because it both makes the spurious claim of being first and deliberately echoes the name of the company which actually was first in that region: the Great Western Railway, Brunel's firm which built the line. Companies like First Great Western are so far from making that kind of contribution to the transport network that they can't even understand how offensive it is to make the comparison. It's like an illiterate Anglo-Saxon chieftain using a derelict Roman temple as a shelter for shitting and then crowning himself emperor in honour of the achievement.
But who, even among the rapacious and amoral forces of international finance that the government is so keen to harness to build schools and hospitals, is going to want Royal Mail? It would be such a depressing thing to buy. Once mighty, reliable, profitable, it now struggles to make ends meet providing a vastly inferior service to a shrinking pool of customers amid price rises almost as far ahead of inflation as email is quicker than the post. We should have known trouble was coming in 2001 when it spent £2m changing its name to Consignia for 16 months. We hoped it was just a midlife crisis but in fact it was the onset of dementia. This is clearly not an institution with the mental health to confront the digital revolution with fortitude.
Not that over-supplying the market with novelty stamps is the worst of its failings. If it can make a fast buck out of people who collect stamps which prolongs its ability to employ people who collect letters, then fine. Then again, if it goes too far, that source of income could be eradicated (pun carefully avoided), which would be an even stupider mistake than a name-change to Letterinterceptatron Inc because, as John Baron points out, it's a financial win-win for Royal Mail when a collector buys a stamp as "They don't have to deliver the letter".
I suppose someone will buy Royal Mail eventually. You can sell anything for the right price thanks to the internet – it's the perfect tool for bringing buyers and sellers together, which is why it must pose such a threat to collecting as a hobby. Gone are the days of scouring obscure philatelic fairs to improve your collection of 1920s Belgian stamps. Now you can just put your requirements into Google and, for the right price, purchase what was once a lifetime's painstaking collecting in a click.
Some say that collecting things is pointless and dull: the trainspotter is as universally accepted a cliche of mockery as the jobsworth is of annoyance. We imagine that trainspotting is what jobsworths do in their time off, rather than something zeitgeistier like tai chi or anal bleaching. But I can understand the appeal of arbitrarily picking something to look for and care about in this bewildering world – of taking pleasure in creating a bit of order amid the chaos. It's a shame if the internet spoils that by making it too easy and driven by money rather than dedication.
Maybe collectors need to go back to base principles: to collecting things, like train numbers, that are of no monetary value, purely for the joy of completeness. The stamp game is up – it was up long before the internet, before Royal Mail started over-issuing – it was up when the first stamps were issued with collectors in mind. Its purity as a hobby came from people eccentrically deciding to treasure those functional little stickers for showing that postage had been paid – to turn them into objects of desire, purely out of a need to lavish something with attention, like a bewildered gorilla mistaking a Barbie for its dead cub.
Royal Mail's enticing new stamps, with their attractive pictures of York Minster and the white cliffs of Dover, are just a prostitute's wiles: desperately extorting cash by exploiting people's need to love. And it'll only inject it straight in its parcel delivery arm.
