Name: Royal Mail.
Age: 502.
Appearance: Never quite when you’re expecting it.
It has improved though, hasn’t it? Not compared to Victorian times, when Londoners could expect post 12 times a day.
Still, we’ve got email and texting now. Which is why the Royal Mail has to promote the ancient art of letter-writing on social media.
A rich and storied history to pick from. What are the odds it picked something appropriate?
Oh dear. It’s not running an entire campaign based on the Zodiac killer’s correspondence with the police? Not quite that bad. But it has festooned a Stratford-upon-Avon postbox with quotes from Shakespeare, and snapped the leads from the RSC’s new Romeo and Juliet production next to it.
Ah. That famous play where a letter saves the day … Quite. As one wag put it on Twitter: “Did anybody there actually read the play? The entire point of the last two acts is that the letter is too late. The whole tragedy is a bloody advertisement for texting.”
Is this like how almost any episode of Murder, She Wrote could have been solved by Googling? Or how Oedipus could have been saved by modern paternity testing? Yes.
It’s almost as though Shakespeare created an elaborate series of conceits in order to drive his lovers apart. It’s almost as though he wanted them to die.
Murderer! I’m guessing that’s also why he set the play in Italy, where the first national postal service only arrived in 1862, 346 years after the British one. Could be.
This seems like one of those spectacular PR own goals that people on the internet go nuts over. Actually, the Royal Mail has refused to cower before the Twitter mob.
Very unsporting of it. What has it said? “We are glad that this postbox has captured the public imagination. In Romeo and Juliet, the letter in question was hand-delivered from Friar Lawrence to Friar John. Once in possession of the letter, poor Friar John was quarantined against the plague, so in these circumstances it seems slightly unfair to blame the postal service!”
Well, these posties are always taking sick days. A dated prejudice. The era when the company was offering cars and holidays to employees just for turning up to work is long gone.
That’ll explain why shares are up by a third in the past year. Yes, privatisation has truly been a roaring success for people who aren’t the British taxpayer.
Do say: “I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate.”
Don’t say: “I’d hazard thee not to leaveth the articles fresh from Amazonia ’pon my door’s steppe, for fear they might dissolve into ether, as phantasms do.”
