Pooh sticks

Warning. There will be a lot of crap gags in this post.

For readers under sixty, allow me to introduce you to a delight to come your way. Shortly after your 60th birthday you will receive a bowel cancer screening kit in the post. This will involve you taking three samples from three separate stools on three separate days (going through the motions?) using a small cardboard stick and smearing some of the result on a small slide. You will then seal this (pretty damn carefully) and post to the screening service agency.

Roughly 20% of the UK's population of 65 million is over 60. 13 million. Assuming an equal distribution of birthdays, and noting that this test is repeated at two year intervals, that makes, again roughly, 20,000 kits a day with six smears of delight in the post.

I have recently received my second kit. I followed the instructions as previously but received a letter back in the post 'insufficient sample'. I had smeared it too thin. Damn. Go again. I went again (and again, and again) and resmeared. (That a word?)

I received a reassuring letter back in the post saying that although it was probably piles or cracked lips (anal lips, my dear arse) there was a trace of blood in my sample and would I go again three times.

We may have a problem with junk mail, but there is far more crap in the post than we think.

Second Class

I know that occasionally we learn stuff that, maybe, we should have known. Perhaps this is something I never really thought about. But why, why pray, do we have a second class stamp?

It occurs to me that since all my letters get dumped into the same post box there must be some early process (which costs money) to separate the first and second class mail.

A Royal Mail employee confirms this. The second class mail is sorted, put on one side and added to the next day's sorting.

Now forgive me for thinking the unthinkable, but if that happens then the same amount of mail is being sorted everyday and it takes one extra process than it need take to get to that point. So if someone could find enough money for overtime to sort one extra batch of second class post on one day then we'd have caught up, the second class system could be abolished and the price of a stamp could meet in the middle. Simples?

Posting

My mother sent me a birthday card which never arrived. I can't work out if this happens to her more than most. She seems to have had a lot of trouble about which she has shared at length in the past. She just told me that 'This has never happened to me before.'

Has your memory gone Mum?

I don't know. I'll have a look later.

Is your hearing aid in?

Not until Monday.

Anyway, whether it has happened to her before or not, she took a note of the time of posting and the details of the box and the fact that the sellotaped-down card contained no money and she has called the Post Office and demanded a full public enquiry. A nice man said he'd investigate. The card had beer bottles on it. I would have liked it.