Junk Mail: It must be Monday

This blog has got a bit diverted into matters which are London centric. The only justification is that Westminster politics can absorb so much public money and time. So, by way of a change I thought I would share the contents of my junk mail with you. Firstly, there were no invitations to acquire a credit card. My efforts to stop this by sending back a message on their pre-paid postcards had no effect but the credit crunch has. Junk mail was not to bad in winter as it provides an endless supply of paper for lighting the Yorkist Range and/ or the Clearview wood burner. In the summer it soon builds up and the paper bank’s ambiguous list of wants means I don’t put the stuff in there, especially where names and address were still present. Even without the peddlers of credit I still mane age to get useless collections of leaflets. One, judging from the logo, is a Royal Mail compendium of insurance products. Another, which always amuses me, is the pizza takeaway offering delivery to our door. A twenty four mile round trip seems rather excessive for us. If we were considering picking one up coming on the way out of town a visit to one of the 24 hour supermarkets we pass might make a better buy. But for a treat it might be fun to get one delivered as suggested by the leaflet. Provision of our post code to their website quickly showed they don’t come this far.

The three other items were not strictly speaking junk. Two were Euro election leaflets from UKIP and the Green Party. We are in the same constituency as our daughter who lives two hours drive away. Since our present MEPs names were unknown to us we visited www.writetothem. We await the sitting candidates leaflets. An excellent service but the names meant little to us. As my earlier ‘Why Blog? ‘piece indicated, these political leaflets are being saved for later comment. Lord Tebbit’s advice not to vote for the main parties, if followed, could have interesting results.

My third piece of mail was a mail shot from my last employer, a college at a joyfully great distance from here. Why on earth anyone out here would want to join an association of former staff I cannot imagine, even though no membership fee is mentioned at this stage. I suppose that as higher education seems to have proceeded on the assumption that academic staff should not have a life outside the collegiate one, there must be quite a few lonely souls finding it hard to exist without the company of their old workmates. Perhaps the most amusing benefit is a discount at a well known bank. What for I ask? Buying its shares or is it for sale? Among the benefits of joining are discounts for lunch in the training restaurant and on the annual membership fee for the gym. All very fine if you have retired within a short travelling distance which is the assumption of the invitation.

The most worrying benefit which is promised is free access to the college library. I always thought it was a public library and free anyway. Does this mean that a pensioner, not a former member of staff, has to pay to use the library? If I have got this wrong perhaps someone should go on an in house copy-writing course. I am sure one would exist as such leaflets are part of the great commodity movement. Education has customers, managers, products and marketers, so it must also be sold like all the other products. It is now an industrialised process and so an item of mail like this should not be surprising. However, it is no more accessible to a rural resident than a pizza delivery service. It is however the urban mind set of both items which irritates and amuses. In other contexts such assumptions would be seen as politically incorrect. So I suppose both items have their instructive uses. But does that stop them being junk?
Dacier