Stamps incomming

Postage for 100g letter to Ireland is €1.25, for the rest of the World it's €2.25!  No wonder nobody writes letters. And of course the two observations are linked in a death spiral. If there was no e-mail and a stamp cost 20c, I daresay Pete the Post would come up our lane more often.  The €1.25 I pay to send a postcard to Galway carries a lot of sorters and supervisors and the Galway equivalent to Pete. One fall-out of the situation is that philately is dead. My collection of mammal stamps has no market.

In early January, just in time for the Orthodox Christmas, but two weeks late for ours, I got a letter from Vladivostok. It was not unexpected, because my old correspondent Сергей Sergey had emailed me in  November for a street address. You have to imagine how the envelope got so beat up. The stamps are all scrorched, that's for sure. I think someone must have left a mailbag out in the rain, or maybe it fell into the sea when some Russian postal worker tried lobbing it onto the last ship leaving port. Ho hum, it's the thought that counts. The news - that Серг is also retired - could fly by internet; but there's something of old style courtesy in sending a card halfway round the world . . . because we both worked in the same field in the last century. More letters, with stamps, are needed.