Tag: birmingham

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A Quick Word About Postcards

Although postcards are now virtually obsolete in daily life, I can remember a time when they were used to enter competitions, to cast votes in polls, and to let friends and family know you’d reached your holiday destination safely.

But when I’m going away for a day or two, I like to maintain the last of those traditions. In most cases, I know I’ll arrive back home before the mail does, even when it’s within Great Britain, but it doesn’t diminish the surprise for the recipient.

A typical card measures around four inches by six, although there are wide variations, with the front featuring a picture or design. The back is split into two equal sections, so your text has to fit into that left section because the address and the stamp will take up the right-hand side. You can also buy books of plain postcards where the address and stamp go on the front, allowing use of the entire rear side.

Still, the fixed format forces you to pick your words wisely or to minimise the size of your handwriting. The inventors of the SMS initially chose 160 characters as the limit based upon those restrictions.

In the earliest days of mobile messaging, each one typically cost between 5p and 10p to send; those figures are not adjusted for inflation. Some handsets supported longer messages, but each block or partial block of 160 characters was charged separately.

Despite this, an SMS easily undercut the price of a stamp in the second half of the 1990s – shown by this table from The Great Britain Philatelic Society – especially as you didn’t need to buy a physical postcard either.

The cost of SMS and similar messages today is negligable. Most phone subscriptions have some element of inclusive or unlimited allowance, putting the higher cost into perspective. On a day trip to Birmingham yesterday, I sent just two cards, but they cost me 87p apiece in second-class stamps.

Knowing I might not have a chance later in the day, my intention was to write them both on the flight and post them at the other end. I forgot to take them out of my bag until we were almost ready to land, but they’re both now safely in the post awaiting delivery.

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I Didn’t Know You Could Do That

When I was around 15 or 16, I heard a track on Radio 2. It was unlike anything I’d encountered before.

There was no singing, yet it wasn’t recognisably rap music. Rather, someone was speaking words over an acoustic funk groove, telling us that The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. At this point, I knew nothing about Gil Scott-Heron and I didn’t understand the majority of his references. Nonetheless, in a little over three minutes, it had shown me something that I didn’t know could be done with words, a relentless stream of passion. When I was at university, I bought the album featuring the track. This was a good 10 years or so before I started to write poetry. But together with the first two albums by The Streets, my mind was stretched in a different direction. Fast forward to the present day, and I’m more selective about what I enjoy and more critical of what I hear. However, these eye-opening moments still happen every so often. Last week, I went to an event in Birmingham held by Out-Spoken Press. I’d initially heard about this through Harry Josephine Giles, who rotated the book while reading from it. I bought it afterwards, and I could see why. The words curled, or were set vertically, or were occasionally run together in a massive heap, whereas it would never have occurred to me to do anything other than start a new line. Birmingham is a more multicultural place than where I’m from, and racism is something that Anthony Anaxagorou tackles head-on, just as Scott-Heron did in the 1970s. Meanwhile, Ollie O’Neill spoke frankly about her experience of Britain’s mental healthcare system, a common theme among poets. Unfortunately, neither of their books are published until next year, so I’ll have to wait. However far my writing career goes, I don’t want to turn into one of these idiots who think they know it all and who stop learning or who taking constructive criticism on board. I want these moments to keep happening to me, the ones that hit me like Gil Scott-Heron did when I was a teenager.
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To the Edge

Over the past week or so, I’ve had a lot of time to write while travelling on trains. In fact, I’m writing this from a hotel room in Birmingham that reminds me of an old-school Butlins chalet. That’s not a criticism; I think it’s marvellous.

Unfortunately, while writing, I haven’t had much time to write about writing. I only started this entry at 5:30pm and it’s due to be published at 6pm.

Douglas Adams is known for saying, ‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.’ I know he was trying to be funny, but I can’t get behind that mentality. To me, a deadline needs to be met, even if it’s a self-imposed one.

Last week, a friend needed a reference for a job application. I hadn’t read the e-mail properly and didn’t realise it needed to be done on the same night. I wrote it nonetheless on the grounds that the employer might be flexible. My friend agreed, so I submitted it the moment it was proof-read.

My top tip for meeting deadlines is to use a paper diary rather than a phone calendar; I favour a Moleskine. The pages are much larger than a mobile device allows, so you can see a week at a time, and you can refer to it while you’re speaking to someone on the phone.