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Snippets of News
Postman Pat promoted
The new TV series featuring Postman Pat, which hit the screens on BBC2 in September last year, featured Pat in his newly promoted role as head of the Special Delivery Service. He now has a PDA, helicopter and a motorbike with a sidecar for Jess, his black and white cat, and his van is now powered by electricity. He spends some of his time in Greendale, which was based on the village of Grasmere in the Lake District and the rest at the mail centre in Pencaster. (Courier November 2008)
Mayday - Rescue at Sea stamps
These featured in the last edition when the SOS in the perfs was shown. The stamps won the Print Design category in the Design Week Awards announced on 3rd March. The stamps, designed by Hat-trick, honoured the lifesaving work of the RNLI and Coastguard Agency and were issued in March 2008. The judges praised the stamps: “These stamps are phenomenal and beautiful. The perforation of SOS signal is very clever”.
Julietta Edgar, Head of Special Stamps, Royal Mail said: “We are delighted with the award; despite their tiny size stamps have always played a major role in showcasing the best of our design talent, requiring imagination and attention to detail that in the case of Mayday - Rescue at Sea even made use of the perforations.”
In the same category more stamps received a special commendation, the Lest We Forget stamp issued in 2007 commemorated the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele.
Stuck fast
If any members have tried to soak off the two NVI values from the GB Christmas 2008 special stamp issues, you will have noticed that they will not come away cleanly and some of the envelope will stay attached.
Posties and their red rubber bands
There has been some discussion recently in the press about the red rubber bands discarded by posties on their rounds. One humorous piece I read even suggested that the public would find that every village and town had nice rectangular or round red receptacles for collecting the bands and returning them to the Post Office. Keep Britain Tidy reckon 6 per cent of England’s streets are littered with the red rubber bands.
A bit of history
Postcodes in the UK are 50 years old. The first Electronic Letter Sorting Identification and Indicator Equipment came into being at this time with the short name of ELSIE. The post code system was introduced at Norwich Mail Centre. (Courier March 2009)
Something new
Thames Valley is the name for the most modern mail centre at Swindon, which combines the Reading and Oxford mail centres with Swindon and has cost £50 million. The Reading mail centre closed in April and Oxford was due to close on 27th June. In total 930 postmen and women and 37 managers will eventually work at the new location, which covers 15,000 square metres and handle 3 million items of mail per day. The staff will be some of the first to be issued with the new Royal Mail uniform. The location was chosen over Reading or Oxford due to good communication links and a central position. Oxford was too small and Reading too dated. It is the only mail centre in the UK with two flat sorting machines and has 25 other mail processing machines. (Courier March 2009).
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