Last week I posted a handful of Christmas cards to New Zealand. The woman in the post office frowned and said I’d missed the deadline for international post. “But it’s only New Zealand, so they will probably get there,” she added, with a slow, small country town smile. I’m not so confident. The record time taken for mail exchanged between my sister and I was 17 days in 2020. Blimey, I could have flown over…
So goes the refrain of a much-covered song from a now-defunct genre of love songs involving ‘snail mail’. Well may they call it that, with packages mailed to my sister in New Zealand taking up to 12 days to arrive. A Leunig calendar mailed to a friend in London in early December still has not arrived! I’ve been hanging out every day for the Postie to arrive. What’s got me on Postie-alert is a series…
If you were feeling all warm and fuzzy about the Big Four banks deciding to drop the hated ‘foreign’ ATM fees, sorry, the feeling won’t last. For a start, the Commonwealth Bank’s decision to go first didn’t last long. The CBA announced the fee abolition early on Sunday (aiming for a slow news day lead). But within hours, Westpac, the ANZ and National Bank of Australia had all suddenly (on a Sunday) released statements that…
Some of my rural readers have been writing impassioned letters about a troubling domestic issue (the rising cost of renting a PO Box). “Dear Mr BobWords, (wrote Perplexed Pensioner of Reeseville) “When we knew we’d be moving to Maleny, we applied for a PO Box. “When we arrived here on Dec 22nd, 1993, the post office was still in the old house on the corner of Teak St. “They kept saying (once we presented ourselves…