Royal Mail

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but amongst the simple things that we've had to relearn as part of living in London is an understanding of the post office. Even something as simple as buying stamps leads to confusion: "Will that be 1st- or 2nd-class stamps?" "Um, I don't know . . . ."

Within the UK, first-class stamps (34 pence for a standard letter, although it doesn't say that on the stamp) aim to get your letter delivered by the next working day (Saturdays included; that's another thing that's taken getting used to--checking the mail on Saturdays), while second-class stamps (a savings of 10 pence) will do the job in three working days. In addition to Saturday mail and two classes of UK mail, we've also gotten used to the way a visit to the post office works: you queue until one of the employees behind plexiglass becomes available, then you weigh your own letters and/ or parcels, push your money under the glass, get your postage pushed back, affix the postage yourself, and then take your mail to another plexiglass window where you deposit the items yourself. By Canadian standards, that's a lot of work for the customer, and the queues can be substantially longer than Canadian lineups as well, when you consider the number of (still odd to us) services that the post office provides, including credit cards, loans, mortgages, bank accounts, licences, foreign currency, top-ups for your mobile phone, gift vouchers, all types of insurance, and even the odd gift or two (there are often marked-down items lining the queues, just in case you'll be tempted by discounted toasters, toys, and telephones). Oh and many smaller post offices close for an hour at lunchtime, so the queues just after lunch are especially long! Still, one of my favourite little quirks of walking around has to do with Royal Mail--traditionally, a post box is inscribed with the initials of the ruling monarch at the time it was placed there, and so you can literally see history around you just by scrutinising post boxes on the streets, or in walls, as the case may be. Take this one, for example, which has been around since Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901)!