There is something wonderfully British about complaining that a first class stamp costs £1.80, as if the entire edifice of the nation is teetering because Auntie Mabel now requires a small mortgage to receive a birthday card.
The assumption, usually delivered with great confidence, is that this is modern decline in action. Things used to be cheap, sensible, properly run. Then along came whoever one happens to dislike this week and ruined the Royal Mail along with everything else.
Except the numbers refuse to cooperate.
The famous penny post, held up as a kind of golden age benchmark, was not the trivial sum it sounds like. A penny in 1840 was not something you found down the back of the sofa. It was a noticeable slice of weekly income. Depending on who you were, you were parting with something like half a percent of your weekly wage just to send a letter. Not ruinous, but not nothing either.
And when the penny post arrived, unless you were a landowner with half the county to manage, the chances were that everyone you knew lived within a few hundred yards of you anyway. Family, work, gossip, the lot. You could lean over a low wall and settle most matters without recourse to the Royal Mail. Which does raise the question of what exactly you were paying for. A bit of distance, perhaps. Or the chance to say something in writing that might feel awkward shouted across the lane.
Set against today’s £1.80, which works out at a similarly small slice of a weekly wage for many people, you start to see the problem. Postage has not obviously become extortionate. If anything, it has stayed in roughly the same territory, albeit with rather less certainty about when it will arrive.
What has changed is how it feels. You stand there with a thin envelope in your hand, stick £1.80 on it, and hesitate. Not because you cannot afford it, but because it feels faintly ridiculous.
Part of that is that we were quietly lulled into a false sense of security. For years stamps were so cheap they barely registered. You bought a book, stuck them on things without thinking, and carried on. At the same time courier services crept in and made sending anything vaguely parcel-shaped surprisingly cheap. It all gave the impression that sending things was, more or less, a solved and inexpensive problem.
You really notice it at Christmas. Thirty cards, easily, and you are into £54 before you have even found a pen that works. At that point the whole thing starts to feel slightly ceremonial. You picture half the list quietly dropping away over the next few years, replaced by the odd message and a thumbs up. No great decision, no announcement, just a gradual drift into not bothering.
There is, briefly, a moment where you try to outsmart it. Put the card in a small box, call it a parcel, send it by courier for roughly the same money and with tracking thrown in. In practice you pay about the same, spend longer doing it, and the thing turns up looking like a spare carburettor.
And then there is the small matter that “first class” no longer quite means what it used to. It is still described as next day, but in practice you find yourself allowing the better part of a week if it actually matters. Which rather takes the edge off paying a premium for speed.
That is not really about the price so much as the alternatives. In 1840, if you wanted to communicate beyond your immediate field of view, this was it. You paid your penny and waited. Now you can send a message instantly, anywhere, for nothing at all. The Victorians would have regarded that as witchcraft and then set up a committee to regulate it.
So the real shift is quite subtle. The actual cost has edged down a bit, but the perceived cost has shot up because it has moved from something you had to do to something you choose to do. You are no longer paying to communicate. You are paying for paper, ink, and a slightly ceremonial version of sending a message.
Which leaves us in the odd position of grumbling about a service that is, in real terms, in roughly the same bracket as when it was introduced, while quietly letting it fade out of everyday life.
Still, £1.80 does feel a touch steep when you are staring at a stack of Christmas cards, sighing, and sending most of them anyway.
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