Philately Phail

How bland

Dear Europe

I know that sending letters and birthday cards and wedding invitations and thank you notes is passé and that making a journey to a post office and queuing up and buying stamps and sticking them on an envelope is boooring and time consuming and possibly exposes one to the germs of humanity, and that the postal services are, as a result of the internet, losing revenue like it’s going out of style, but come on. 

Is there any excuse for this?

France, your stamp is so dull and lacking in imagination that it beggars description. It features three paper airplane motifs, which is cute as a concept, but disastrous in execution. 

England, what has become of your noble philatelic tradition? Why is your stamp so big? Why is it brown? The image is cleverly composed of a wavy line of text “The Royal Mail” and recalls the classic young monarch of her early reign. Yet all is lost because it is designed so that the mailing information is printed right over the queen’s face, surely shooting itself in its own foot?

And what of the essential information written on an envelope: the name and address? Each of these necessarily obscures that, forcing the English stamp in particular to bend over the top. 

Stamps used to be beautiful. They used to be something you’d tear off the corner of a delivered piece of mail to keep. Stamps ought to be designed to enhance calligraphy or good penmanship for an aesthetically winning object worthy of the price of postage. 

That’s more like it! 

Europe, you give me the sads :-(