Lost art of letter writing

[Mark from Yorkshire]

I saw this on Sunday in one of the UK tabloid newspaper opinion pieces and thought it rather ironic as I was writing to both @Ambien and @Fo0zle. That and also by hand using a Fountain Pen and ink. It is by Guest Columnist Sara Wallis. I thought it was Quite topical

[Mercian]

Ooh, don’t Get Me Started on the privatised ‘Royal’ Mail’s constant attempts to weasel/wheedle its way out of its contractually-specified obligations that its owners knew about when they bought-in to the company! 😠

 

I expect that it will not now be long before our government acquiesces to its repeatedly-bruited demands that it ‘should’ no longer ‘have to’ deliver 6 days a week by law.
Its de facto refusal to honour that de jure obligation in rural areas is disgusting enough, and so are its oft-repeated price-hikes for stamps/postal charges.

I also expect that, not long after that, it will ‘request’ - and be given - permission to change its business model; to one that, on top of the prices charged to senders, includes a system of charging those who live outwith our major cities additional sums (probably on a constantly-collected Direct Debit basis) in order to receive these ‘extra-cost’ deliveries.
Including charging us for the unsolicited Junk Mail that forms the bulk of what they do deliver.

 

‘Paranoid’ you say? Or ‘Persecution Complex’? Moi?  

[Baggins]

On 4/18/2024 at 9:14 PM, Mark from Yorkshire said:

I saw this on Sunday in one of the UK tabloid newspaper opinion pieces and thought it rather ironic as I was writing to both @Ambien and @Fo0zle. That and also by hand using a Fountain Pen and ink. It is by Guest Columnist Sara Wallis. I thought it was Quite topical

What I find very strange is nobody actually writing about the evermore real problem with digital media. As I always say: once you write a msg, email, anything digital, it is no longer yours or remotely private. If you think “deleting” has any practical effect on the data, you are wrong!

Z.

[Mark from Yorkshire]

Thanks @Mercian and @Baggins I had not thought of that. Our posties are truly brilliant. It’s like any other large business the board and management are the problem. Don’t get me started on our Government. Politics and politicians best left out of it

[Mercian]

Just now, Mark from Yorkshire said:

Our posties are truly brilliant. It’s like any other large business the board and management are the problem. Don’t get me started on our Government. Politics and politicians best left out of it

EXACTLY! 👏👏👏

[LizEF]

On 4/18/2024 at 3:13 PM, Mercian said:

in rural areas

How can you even be considered to have "rural" areas!?  Google maps tells me it's a 10.5 hour drive from some town called Plymouth (way down south) to Aberdeen in Scotland.  10.5 hour drive is a day trip already!  Come on!  You'd only have to stop for gas once in between.  Rural schmural!  Do your postmen have to walk the entire route?  (/end of baffled American head-shaking. <-- Teasing, folks, teasing, but really, the whole island is tiny from an American perspective.)

 

On 4/18/2024 at 3:13 PM, Mercian said:

unsolicited Junk Mail

Yeah, this should be universally banned - let people ask for it if they want it and stop wasting everyone else's time!

 

Meanwhile, I really need to write some letters!

[Mercian]

3 hours ago, LizEF said:

How can you even be considered to have "rural" areas!?  Google maps tells me it's a 10.5 hour drive from some town called Plymouth (way down south) to Aberdeen in Scotland.  10.5 hour drive is a day trip already!  Come on!  You'd only have to stop for gas once in between.  Rural schmural!  Do your postmen have to walk the entire route?  (/end of baffled American head-shaking. <-- Teasing, folks, teasing, but really, the whole island is tiny from an American perspective.)

😁

Indeed, the British Isles are tiny (IIRC, the entire land area of the UK is “slightly smaller than Oregon”).

 

But into that tiny area, we have crammed the equivalent of the entire population of California, PLUS the entire population of Texas. And that population is crammed into those areas of our ‘slightly smaller than Oregon’ land that are not ‘mountains’ (pimple-sized hills in comparison to US ones), or swamps, or agricultural fields.

 

The idea of being able to drive from Plymouth to Aberdeen in 10.5 hours is based on the roads being empty of all other traffic for the whole trip 

 

Our cities’ central roads were laid-out in mediaeval times, and they are not simple grids.
Their routes were laid-out to accommodate/avoid hills, valleys, streams, rivers, and rich men’s gardens. Their widths were based on those of mediaeval ox-carts.

Our rural roads are, in some cases, layouts from the Anglo-Saxon era. Some of the straighter, wider ones are actually Roman routes. Some others are ‘recent’, having been created as results of the land-grabbing Enclosure Acts of the 17th-19th centuries. They, too, were based on the widths of mediaeval ox-carts.

 

A better indication of the joys of travelling in the UK can be had by looking up the time that it would take to drive from Fulham FC’s ground ‘Craven Cottage’ in west central London, to West Ham Utd FC’s ‘London Stadium’ in the Stratford that is in the eastern bit of central London during business hours (Mon-Fri, 0900-1700).
The straight-line distance is ~10 miles.

 

Or how long it takes (& how much it costs) to get a train from Aberystwyth to Swansea (both of which are in the southern half of tiny Wales) on a Sunday.
Straight line distance is ~60 miles.

 

In Europe (and especially in Britain), 200 miles is a long way!

 

By contrast, in the USA, 200 years is a long time.
In Britain, 200 years doesn’t even cover the reigns of the ten most-recent heads of State!
And e.g.s the eastern half of the entirely unremarkable house in which I live is now 150 years old, and the High School that I attended grew out of a ‘Grammar School’ that was founded in 1588, which is actually fairly late by the standards of the UK.

 

Edit to add:

For fun, why not visit https://trafficcameras.uk betwen 0730 & 0900 UK time (or 1630 & 1830), and look at the CCTV feeds from the traffic cameras on the M25 near Heathrow or the Dartford crossing.

Or the M6/A38 from Jn 6 to Birmingham city centre.

Or the M6 around its junction with the M5, or with the M56, or with the M62, or between Preston & the M55.

Or the M6 around Jn 4, where it merges with the M42 and the A446.

 

Like yer man said, ‘I had not thought Death had undone so many’ 😁

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, Mercian said:

The idea of being able to drive from Plymouth to Aberdeen in 10.5 hours is based on the roads being empty of all other traffic for the whole trip 

I used google maps to come up with that, which in theory accounts for traffic.  Of course, I did that "Leave now", which might actually have been low traffic times, given the time difference...  And google (everything, not just maps) seems to me to get less and less accurate by the nanosecond.  It's still bizarre to think of anything as "far away" on such a tiny island.  Not saying it can't be / isn't, just a bizarre idea to an American:

 

1 hour ago, Mercian said:

Our cities’ central roads were laid-out in mediaeval times...

I know.  (Remember, I was mostly teasing.  I've done an 18 hour drive to my parents home without stopping except to fill the car's tank and, ahem, empty mine.  Each way, of course.  I think I've done that trip 5 or 6 times now - I've got it perfected, right down to which gas stations to stop at.)

 

1 hour ago, Mercian said:

In Europe (and especially in Britain), 200 miles is a long way!

In the US, 2000 miles is a long way.  

 

And yes, we don't really know the meaning of "history" - surely a big reason our country is a mess.

[Mark from Yorkshire]

Leeds Yorkshire England to Thurso northern Scotland 9 hours with stops on a good run to 12 hours with major trunk roads side roads and any other roads flooded. Roughly 450 miles at 50mph. 

[Mercian]

24 minutes ago, LizEF said:

I've done an 18 hour drive to my parents home without stopping except to fill the car's tank

Oh, wow!

In my twenties, I used to drive from the Midlands down to south-east London to see my then-girlfriend for the weekends, which back then would only take 3-4 hours*.
By the end of that journey I would often have ‘missing hours’; periods during which I had been blasting down the motorways at very high speeds, but of which I had no memory at all 😮

 

The idea of spending eighteen hours on a single journey blows my mind! I reckon that, by the end of it, I would be hallucinating freeway, traffic, and signs that say ‘Next sign: 30 miles’ 😉

 

* I once managed the return journey from her house in under two hours.
But that was late on a Sunday night, in thick freezing fog, and no sane person was out on the roads. UK law says one should drive in the innermost lane of the motorway, except when overtaking, and that one should reduce one’s speed to match the conditions.

Once I realised that the foul conditions meant that there was almost nobody else out there, I just sat in the outside lane of the motorway, and ‘blew the moths out of the carburettor’ the whole of the way back north, watching an occasional pair of tail-lamps flash-past ‘backwards’ two lanes to my left, until I got off the motorway near my home town. Naughty!

[Mark from Yorkshire]

@LizEF Plymouth to Thurso or John o groats would be at least an 18 hour drive. 

[Mark from Yorkshire]

@Mercian I’d love for you to try that now. Between cameras road works and incompetence. The task would at best be difficult at worst see you getting a driving ban under totalling up regs. That is the part of my job I hate.

[Mercian]

1 minute ago, Mark from Yorkshire said:

@Mercian I’d love for you to try that now. Between cameras road works and incompetence. The task would at best be difficult at worst see you getting a driving ban under totalling up regs. That is the part of my job I hate.

I wouldn’t even try it nowadays!

Especially not if I had to travel up the M6, e.g. from Stafford to the Lake District.

The average-speed cameras, and the sections of (sooo-not-) ‘Smart’ motorways, with an extra lane of traffic running on the hard shoulder, coupled with the nose-to-tail HGVs and the usual reason-free tailbacks (caused by the current traffic still having to react to its predecessors’ reactions to incidents that occurred ages ago), would make such a journey impossible.

 

Have you attempted to drive round the SE corner of Birmingham recently?
From the M6 to the M42 to get on to the M40 for Oxford/London?

It’s where the potentially-3 lanes of traffic from the M6 merge into the 3 lanes of traffic from the M42, plus the two lanes of traffic from the A446.
It’s just south of the junction where the traffic from that accursèd exercise-in-entrapment toll motorway has merged-in.

 

It is absolute bloody chaos, which is made worse by the fact that there are overhead gantries about every 200 yards, with ‘average speed’ ANPR cameras on the backs of them.

So, rather than devoting one’s attention to where all of the different vehicles are going as their drivers try to merge across each other at high speed in order to be in the correct lanes to head for Oxford, London, the SW, or to Birmingham, one is forced instead to constantly and repeatedly check one’s speedometer.

And those cameras are meant to ‘promote’ safety? 🤷‍♂️🤪

[LizEF]

19 minutes ago, Mercian said:

The idea of spending eighteen hours on a single journey blows my mind!

What can I say, I like to drive, and it's better than the joke they call airport security.  Also, the first couple of times, I had two very large dogs - no way was I going to try to fly them, nor board them somewhere.

 

19 minutes ago, Mark from Yorkshire said:

@LizEF Plymouth to Thurso or John o groats would be at least an 18 hour drive. 

Man!  You guys clearly need to update your roads.  My trip is 1,163 miles one-way.  (Though the gas mileage going there is tons better because it's mostly down-hill (4,373' to 1,207').  Coming back is seriously up-hill...)

 

3 minutes ago, Mercian said:

The average-speed cameras, and the sections of (sooo-not-) ‘Smart’ motorways...

Sounds positively demonic.

[Mercian]

21 minutes ago, LizEF said:

You guys clearly need to update your roads.

We don’t have enough free space to do it 😔 (let alone the money! 🤪)

[Mercian]

1 hour ago, LizEF said:

Of course, I did that "Leave now", which might actually have been low traffic times, given the time difference... 

 

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/London+Stadium,+London/Craven+Cottage,+Stevenage+Rd,+London+SW6+6HH/@51.5052017,-0.1969247,12z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m18!4m17!1m5!1m1!1s0x48761d6975e8b559:0xe7fca44605b6ce94!2m2!1d-0.0172211!2d51.5386761!1m5!1m1!1s0x48760fa7a4488157:0xa0377f648d942d05!2m2!1d-0.2216078!2d51.4749003!2m3!6e0!7e2!8j1713774600!3e0?hl=en&entry=ttu

 

That’s Google’s prediction for driving from Craven Cottage to the London Stadium, setting out at 0830 tomorrow (a Monday) morning. The shortest road route is 12.5 miles.
Note not just the predicted travel time, but also the discrepancy in the predicted range of travel time, as a percentage of the lower figure.

😁

 

I must also add that, on the basis of my own less-than-happy memories of driving in London, the quoted journey-time figure even seems optimistic to me 😱

(Full disclosure: my middle name is Eeyore 😉)

[LizEF]

2 hours ago, Mercian said:

We don’t have enough free space to do it 😔 (let alone the money! 🤪)

Well, clearly you need all your roads elevated.   Perhaps if the government banned cars, sold them all to wherever else in the world drives on the wrong side of the road, and then issued everyone a jet pack...   How fun would that be!?

 

1 hour ago, Mercian said:

That’s Google’s prediction for driving from Craven Cottage to the London Stadium, setting out at 0830 tomorrow (a Monday) morning. The shortest road route is 12.5 miles.
Note not just the predicted travel time, but also the discrepancy in the predicted range of travel time, as a percentage of the lower figure.

You ought to be able to bike that route faster!   But I don't suppose it's any friendlier to bikes.  You definitely need to look into personal jet packs...

[Mark from Yorkshire]

@Mercian unfortunately yes, as we have sites around Birmingham. I try and avoid the M6 swindle (toll) as I am a tight Yorkshireman. Last time I used the A42/M42 I was in a speed restricted and tracked small van as I was plate load testing

[Mercian]

11 hours ago, LizEF said:

You ought to be able to bike that route faster!   But I don't suppose it's any friendlier to bikes.  You definitely need to look into personal jet packs...

😁

Hmm 🤔
Your idea, Minister, of enabling us bibulous Brits to buzz around above Blighty in personal jet-packs is one that I would describe as being, er, bold 😉

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, Mercian said:

😁

Hmm 🤔
Your idea, Minister, of enabling us bibulous Brits to buzz around above Blighty in personal jet-packs is one that I would describe as being, er, bold 😉