In the bad old days, the
village postman wasn’t much good with foreign names (although he liked to
collect stamps, sometimes removing them with a certain amount of bureaucratic
relish from the corner of the envelope). It was no big deal: in those times, the twenty pound
notes tenderly send by my dad’s sister would be folded inside within a sheet of carbon
paper to fool the early X-Ray machines in Madrid.
I’d be sent to Old Martín
with instruction to collect all the foreigners’ letters – at least those of the
foreigners who were sat in the village square, drinking and gossiping.
It’s not as bad as it sounds.
The correos opened in those day at the reasonable hour of 3.00pm.
Anyone who wasn’t in the
square drinking, naturally risked losing his twenty quid.
(To explain: In the late
sixties, the British only allowed one to take out fifty, later sixty, pounds a
year on holiday. We would all head to Gibraltar for a top-up until General
Franco closed the border.)
It’s a far cry from today. Now
we don’t know each other – there’re too many of us – and the post office
wouldn’t give out the mail to some spotty foreign kid anyway. Now, it’s either
delivered by a person dressed in a yellow uniform driving an equally buff-coloured three-wheel motorcycle, or its
placed in a tin post-box and you come along during opening hours to see what –
if anything – is new.
As for the folded twenty
pound notes, now the British Government lets you take abroad as much as you
like: to spend freely on rounds of brandy, weekends in a Parador or buying a
second hand car with no MOT and the steering wheel on the wrong end of the
dashboard.
Before they took to
delivering the mail, I too had a post box: un
apartado. Nº 35 it was. Then they started charging a heavy sum for its
rental, insisted that each person who used the PO Box would have to pay separately
for the same number, and they introduced (free) house deliveries anyway.
It was an easy call, although
any letters which later arrived at my Nº 35 were solemnly returned to sender,
unread.
I’m sure that as a result of the Person Unknown stamp on the repatriated item, the editors of
my old school magazine were convinced that I had precipitously joined the list
of ‘the dearly departed’.
Which, on the bright side,
saved me continuing with my modest annual subscription.
The world moved on, and
someone invented emails, which took the wind out of the sails of the Spanish
postal system. Then along came DHL and their parcel-totting competitors, plus
those fellows who whizz through the city traffic on their bicycles with an
urgent message stuffed down their Velcro pouch.
The post office was on the
ropes.
So it invented in own
high-speed parcel delivery system, operated as a bank for a while, started to
sell books by right-wing authors (have a look next time), sent and received
money abroad, sold stickers, lottery coupons and magazines and generally moved,
as they say, forward.
The postage stamps were another
change. Instead of a stamp which one could lick and affix, the new ones have
peel-off backs. Or, and more usually, they print out an inelegant sticky strip with numbers and bar-codes, and
press it onto your envelope – as often as not hiding part of the first line of
the address.
So today, I went to post a
letter to foreign parts and said that I wanted a stamp rather than an adhesive
label, if it was all the same to them.
There was a fuss, but
eventually the clerk played ball and found two stamps. The first had a peel-off
back, the second did not. It has to be glued on, she said, as – not finding the
glue-stick – she sellotaped it onto the envelope.
But let me leave on a
positive note.
I always used to joke that
when I grew up, they would put me on a postage stamp. Now, it appears, you can take
along a photo to the correos and they
will run
you up a set of 24 street-legal stamps, with a sticky back, and bearing
your smiling image.
I think I could have some fun
with that.
