End of an era

When I lived in England, the mail arrived twice a day, six days a week.  (Maybe only once on Saturdays; I can’t remember.)  Within town, you could mail something in the morning, and know that it would arrive at its destination in the evening.  It put the American postal service to shame — although it had the signal advantage, of course, of operating over a smaller geographic area than the US mail.

Times have changed.  Small geographic area or not, the British postal service has fallen so far that it will now deliver mail only five days a week.  Yup.  Saturday service is getting the axe.

Frankly, in a day and age in which more and more routine correspondence — be it bills, invitations, thank you notes, or plain old howdies — is being handled over the computer, I can see snail mail becoming obsolete.  Most of the time all that I get in snail mail is catalogs and hardware store fliers.  It’s obviously still necessary for packages (although I’m sure they’ll be beamed through one of these days), but there is a smaller role for the traditional kind of mail those of us over 15 remember.  While I’m kind of saddened by the changes in England, all I can do is wonder when they’ll follow suit over here.