Painted Christmas

Now then. I know it's ridiculously early, and I'm usually the first to be shouting at decorations appearing in John Lewis in September, but I wanted to share a pertinent thought with you all. A few of you will remember the Christmas cards I painted between 1998 and 2006, generally featuring buildings around Oundle in Northamptonshire, but always featuring a Royal Mail van of one vintage or another. More of you will perhaps have seen them in the Christmas chapter in More From Unmitigated England. Later, in discussion with the Royal Mail over a book on post boxes, I accidentally found myself showing them off. They were leapt upon, and I found three of them being proposed as Christmas stamps to the august body that is the Stamp Advisory Committee.They were the RM's stamps of choice, but the Committee decided on photographs of leaves floating on water by Andy Goldsworthy.

So, to get to the point (yes please, Ed.) I have decided to sell the original paintings.They are all a uniform size, 155mm x 155mm, and are executed in Designers Gouache. If you are seriously interested, then contact me through this blog and I'll send a pdf poster of all nine to you. The usual copyright stuff applies, but we'll talk about all that off piste as it were. The three paintings here feature, from the top, Oundle Post Office, the bridge over the River Nene at Fotheringhay and one of the two gate lodges to Lilford Hall. Obviously much artistic licence has been liberally applied along with the paint.

"...very impressive" Chris Beetles

Postal Orders

So. What I want to know is, when the Royal Mail gets privatised, will it still be the Royal Mail? Presumably not. I can't find a news item or discussion that even mentions it in passing, but don't we think it's important? You know what will happen. It'll be called something crass like Post For Yoo-Hoo; after all, look at the high level of thinking behind the moronic and quickly dispensed with 'Consignia'. And not being the Royal Mail means we won't see the reigning monarch's cipher cast into the iron. I think I'm right in saying that there's a dictat ( probably stuffed behind a radiator at Mount Pleasant Sorting Office) that they will always be painted red, like London buses. But you never know what mindlessness can beset those responsible for looking after our visual environment. The pillar box above is in Letchworth, the first garden city. Looking around, the colour that predominates in the leafy streets, apart from the cream renders and burnt orange tile hanging, is green. Green leaves, green trees, green lawns and the original Letchworth green doors, drainpipes and garden gates. So what colour did the council, unencumbered with any thought concerning their fabulous heritage, order the wheelie bins in? Of course. A mind-numbing shade of purple. 

Posting Dilemma

I've always had a thing about post boxes, and tend to photograph them all the time on my travels. Apart from being very graphic objects- all that red and black and seriously heavy cast iron- they can be a history lesson in who was king or queen at the time of the erection, as it were. The ciphers cast into the iron can be anything from Victoria's to our own Queen, with a handful cast for Edward VIII before he abdicated. Most boxes in urban areas will be pillar boxes, with wall boxes and boxes strapped to telegraph poles proliferating in the countryside. I am intrigued as to what happened here at Woolpit in West Suffolk. Presumably the wall box capacity became too small, but you wouldn't have thought the demand for posting to have grown that much between George V's reign (the wall box) and George VI's (the pillar box). I love the fact that they are both still in use, the wall box announcing that it's 'for large envelopes please'.