Mastodawn

I’ve sent and received letters since PostNord, the Danish postal service, stopped delivering letters. The courier company’s numerical code stamped on an envelope makes me wince every time. The loss of stamps really is a loss. Those lovely miniature artworks that wandered around in our everyday world, casually celebrating literature, science, culture, space, art, nature. Gone.

Never mind the Penny Black. There's a stamp with my library on it.

#Dokk1
#Aarhus
#Libraries

Stamps as art were, alas, effectively gone before PostNord actually stopped delivering letters. They'd switched to plain fixed-price stamps.

This is about €25 of unused stamps. You couldn't exchange them at the post office before it shut. Now you can only get a refund if you print a special sheet from the PostNord website, attach the stamps to it and pay to send it by certified courier. In other words, they planned it to put you off seeking a refund. A cheap ending to their service, I think.

I showed this to a currently young person the other day and it took some explaining.

I made an off-the-cuff reference to the Penny Black stamp almost four hours ago and I can't believe it's taken me this long to remember that I saw the Penny Black Printing Press recently and never bragged about it on the Fediverse.

The Penny Black Printing Press is part of the free Philatelic Exhibition at the British Library. Rolling out drawer after drawer of amazing stamps that told story after story of colonialism and independence was a mixed-emotion experience. Moving and infuriating and motivating. I both appreciated the exhibition and wanted it not to be in such a British institution. I wanted one of the other countries to be telling me the stories.

Fully understand this sentiment 👍

@grb090423 I wasn't sure of the feeling or how to express it. Thank you.

Otte Homan - remember Geordie Mar 5

@CiaraNi Nice. Could do with a bigger wheel though.

@otte_homan Oh this one was for the stamps for the small envelopes

Otte Homan - remember Geordie Mar 5

@CiaraNi sure. But one can print small envelopes with a small drum and a bigger wheel.

ben B here Mar 5

@CiaraNi I love the term "currently young person". Looking forward to trying it out on my kids & see if they tune into the transient nature of age. 👴👵✌️ Or should I be writing a letter?

@ben_b_here Haha yes, I like the idea of it as a salutation in a letter. 'Dear Currently Young Person'

Agathe bleibt daheim Mar 5

In Germany this "thing" is yellow, one side "National" the other side "International". I still work with it.
And I love stamps as well! Those little very elaborate beautiful and sometimes funny pieces of art! ✉️📬

@AgatheBleibtDaheim Oh yours is much fancier! I love the colour and the shape. I hope you keep your postal service. Everything that everybody predicted would go wrong once the national letter delivery service was outsourced to a private courier company here has gone predictably wrong.

Agathe bleibt daheim Mar 5

I hope that too. I love to handwrite cards and letters abd of course I love to receive them as well!

@AgatheBleibtDaheim Me too

Lappenjammer Mar 5

@CiaraNi @AgatheBleibtDaheim

I'm with you on all of this.

May I ask how you send letters in Danmark now? I habe been wondering.

@LappenjammerDieZweite @AgatheBleibtDaheim Letter delivery has been outsourced to the DAO courier company. You buy a code online and drop the letter off in a tatty makeshift plastic box in the nearest kiosk or shop that is also a DAO package collection point. A non-digital way is promised but delayed. They deliver letters to addresses, but badly. A backlog of 16,000 letters after a few weeks. Bank cards, medical tests etc arriving too late or missing. A bag of post found in a hedge.

Lappenjammer Mar 5

@CiaraNi What fresh hell this is! I thought about all the things still needed to be sent by mail. Privatisation needs to stop where it concerns people's basic needs, and a reliable postal things is part of that!

@LappenjammerDieZweite I agree wholeheartedly! It is almost but not quite comical how quickly all the predicted problems predictably became actual problems.

Lappenjammer Mar 5

@CiaraNi What the "naysayers" "nitpicked" or "created problems where tjhere were none". Obviously.

@LappenjammerDieZweite Exactly 🙂

Agathe bleibt daheim Mar 5

@CiaraNi @LappenjammerDieZweite

I've got Brexit-vibes!

I just wonder, what would happen if I wrote a real physical letter from Munich to Aarhus. Would you ever receive it?

@AgatheBleibtDaheim @LappenjammerDieZweite It's hard to know how much worse DAO's delivery times are yet, given that PostNord's letter delivery was dysfunctional in recent years. 32 days for a letter from Copenhagen to Frederikshavn. 10 months for a correctly addressed birthday card from Aarhus to London. Bananas. We could give it a try - send a dated postcard in each direction on the same day and see how it goes!

Agathe bleibt daheim Mar 5

@CiaraNi @LappenjammerDieZweite

That would be fun! We should start on 1st of April! 🥳
The first official postcard trial and if it doesn't work at all we will try pigeons again!

@AgatheBleibtDaheim I'm in! 1st of April - good, that's plenty of time for me to train the pigeon who's been trying to make a nest on my balcony.

Agathe bleibt daheim Mar 5

Coocooroo! 🕊

Karen Mardahl Mar 5

@CiaraNi Call me an old fuddy duddy or a boring old fart, but the arrival of a letter with art-bearing stamps on them gave a thrill that “you’ve got mail” has never given. Oh sure, an email can easily contain news that has a lot of value for you. That letter, though. Especially if it was on stationery or if it contained clippings, photos, or other ephemera, told a story all by itself. It was basically a small package, but where a lot of the load was invisible to non-recipients. An old email can bring back memories, but a letter is a wormhole to those memories, which takes you to a more enriched and enhanced memory. This image of that bit of cardboard for measuring letters does bring back memories!

@kmdk Oh yes, all of this resonates! This is a lovely description. Especially the mention of clippings made me sigh with memories. Cutting things out of newspapers or magazines, folding them into a letter, tucking it into an envelope, sending it to someone you cared about in the neighbouring city or next county or another country. Just because you thought it might interest them. Clippings used to fall out of letters like declarations of love and family and friendship.

Karen Mardahl Mar 5

@CiaraNi Spot on! ❤️ Your last sentence makes me swoon! Beautifully put! ☺️

@kmdk Thank you, and thank you for reminding me of clippings, which has borne me down memory lane 💚

katzenberger Mar 5

A physical character limit.

@katzenberger Ha yes

Bjarne Oldrup Mar 5

@CiaraNi "Et brev i en stang- eller rulleform er altid et maxibrev" or loosly translated: "A letter in a rod or scroll form is always a maxi letter"

Yeah. Needs some explaining, now and then 🤷‍♂️

@oldrup It seemed so antiquated to them that they probably pictured papyrus scrolls.