British Royal 'pain in the arse' Mail

The big royal wedding is inching closer, but, alas, I still have not received my invitation. It certainly is no secret that I'm a constitutional monarchist, and the moniker of one of the most mentally stable members of the British Royal Family was bestowed upon me at birth, so it seems perfectly acceptable that I should expect to have received a royal embossed envelope in the mail by now. So, where the bloody hell are ya, my little regal invite? Hmm, I wonder if Lara Bingle knows where it is.

I shouldn't be surprised.  The postal classification of First Class merely ensures your mail will be lost even sooner that if sent at the regular rate.


It would just be so typical of the British Royal Mail to lose my invitation to the Wills and Kate nuptials.  During my backpacking stint in England many moons ago, I worked as a casual mail sorter at the Royal Mail Sorting and Letter Misplacement and Frequent Displacement Centre in Oxford.  During an action-packed five days working for the Queen's mailbag, I learnt much about the efficiency and professionalism of the national mail service. 

For example, one of my learned colleagues told me he sorted the letters by handwriting style, because that made his day just race on by.  Through watching my colleagues, I learnt that it was not necessarily essential to sort every piece of mail by the correct postcode.  Well, I kinda thought it was essential to sort every bit of mail by the correct postcode, so I had a formal conversation with my supervisor to that effect. 

Alas, the captain of the mailroom did not appreciate my insane common sense palaver, and so ended my short, turbulent career in the royal mailroom.  Which was a shame, because it was so mentally stimulating spending eight hours sorting thousands and thousands of white paper squares into numbered piles.  Unless you have undertaken menial work of this nature, you have NO idea how excited one gets when one comes across a red envelope!  I even got a blue one and a yellow one in quick succession one afternoon, and the sheer joy got me through my shift.  But no-one seemed to care if I sorted them correctly.  You know, in a way the average Joe might expect their mail to be sorted in a mail-sorting centre.

So essentially what I am saying is that the British Royal Mail is not really the ideal service to use if you want your Oxfordshire-bound postage items to a) get from A to B, b) get from A to B without going through C, D and E, and c) get to its destination in less than six weeks, if at all.