FACTORALY - E117 MAIL

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

The mail has been around for ages, but until recently, only for heads of state, governments and the very wealthy. Nowadays, anyone can send a letter or a parcel anywhere in the world. But how did we get from there to here? In this week's episode, we put our hand in the post box and get stuck! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Bruce. Hi, Simon. How are you on this fine day? I'm fine. I expect to be interrupted at any minute, however. Why is that then? Well, the time that we record this. Anyway, we'll get into that in a minute. So, where are we? What are we? What are we doing? what's going on, who am I? All of the above. According to my records,

you are Bruce Fielding, voiceover artist, extraordinaire. Let me just check my driving licence. Yes, yes, you're quite right. Excellent. And I'm Simon Wells, equally voiceover artist, extraordinaire.

Yes. And we're both sort of very nerdy. We do nerdy things like go to pub quizzes and say to each other, oh, I tell you what I learned today. Yes. We read a lot of useless facts. We do. Or here or watch. Yes. However they come to us, they stick in our brain longer

than the useful stuff. And then once a week, we come here and we offload the excess facts that are clouding our minds onto all of you, lovely unsuspecting folk. Thank you very much for your service. Yes. It's very cathartic. Yes, we like it. So what's the subject this week, Simon? The subject this week, Bruce, is the Postal Service. So we've done one on beer, which you like. We've done one on watches, which I like. I've done one on kites, which I like.

So I think people might know that there's a connection between you and the Postal Service. Yeah, I think I've mentioned this a couple of times previously in passing. In a totally former career, I spent 17 and a bit years as a postman. Right. Before making the obvious and natural segue into voiceover artistry, yes, I was a posty and I worked in the Staines area. Did you enjoy it? Yes and no.

Elements of it were really good. I've never been fitter than I was back then. I was far exceeding my recommended number of steps each day. Yes. Out and about on your own, listening to podcasts and music on your headphones. Meeting people, having chats and cups of tea with customers, very, very nice. With your black and white cat. Interestingly, at the time, I didn't own a black and white cat.

I had a ginger and white cat, but that doesn't fit the postman Pat theme tune quite so well. But never mind. There were elements of it I didn't like. Going out in stormy weather when you've got a cold. So this episode is going to be, I'm really, really trying to bring out interesting facts and not just give a sort of a soliloquy of my 17 years in Royal Mail. Yes, exactly. I remember the day when I phoned a dog attached to my leg. Yes, I did, I did receive multiple dog bites. Oh, lovely. It is actually a thing. It sort of

sounds like an absolute cliche, but dogs have been known to not like posties, which I can kind of understand. We enter their territory uninvited, we crunch along their gravel drive, we make a loud noise at the door and then we leave. Yeah. And it does get some of them a little bit annoyed and I received no fewer than five dog bites whilst I was

a postman. My postman loves my dog. My dog loves my postman. Whenever the doorbell rings for the postman which is why I may be interrupting this reason. He goes nuts and then he runs and says hello to the postman. The new one, Dave, loves my dog.

But the previous one, Carl, he used to even bring treats for my dog. Oh, really? Yeah. Huh. So when did the Postal Service start? I mean, what is Post? Why do we call it Post? Right.

Okay, well, that's a good place to start. Okay, so Post comes from the old French post, which comes from the old Latin, Postis, which comes from the even older Latin, Ponere. which means to place or position or station something in place, posting something. Right. Oh, I see, yes. Because you can post signs, can't you? Yeah, so you place a sign, you position a sign. It all comes back to that postist. And essentially it comes from the time, sort of the earliest methods of sending communications to other people was to hand a letter to a person on a horse. And if they were travelling long distance, they couldn't do the whole journey with just one person and one horse because it would take too long and they both get exhausted.

So they had various places where they would stop and hand that letter to the next rider with a horse and then the next and then the next. Each of those places were posting stations. Okay. And so just through over-frequent use, I'm sending a letter through the post service. Yes.

That eventually became post. But yeah, you had post horses. You had post boys or postdillions. They were hired by a postmaster. So it's postilions? Postillions. I thought that was someone's bottom. That's posterior.

Because there was When I was young There was like One of those terrible translation Very small vocabs Like vocabularies And they'd have like expressions In the back of them

Oh yes yeah And it would be The Lightning has struck my postillion Oh how interesting Which I always thought was an arse But it may just be Well it may be euphemistic Wasn't it

You know The Lightning has actually struck my post boy But because it sounds A bit like posterior It could be used in In that place Yes interesting And they were

worked out of a post house or a post office. Right. And so that ends the vocabulary. Also interchangeable with mail, which has always bugged me. What's the difference in post and mail? I guess, hmm, I don't know. Right. Okay, so technical. So mail comes from an old, old,

old French word for bag or satchel. And then eventually that became the bag that the post people would carry the letters in. And therefore, over the years, over the centuries, mail the bag became mail the contents of the bag which became the letters the mail interestingly in America the postal service carry mail in the UK royal mail carry the post no one really knows why one sounds a bit more American than the other but there is no technical difference in this country we used to use the word mail more in terms of sending letters and parcels overseas

and we used to use post to the horses thing that I just mentioned. But it's been around for a while. I mean, it's been around since sort of Egyptian times where people were sending Post. Oh, really? Well, Post used to be for royalty and the very rich and the very posh people. Sort of globally, it was something that was only done by the wealthy.

Yeah. And I suppose also by, the people who had something to say. Yes. You know, the common folk couldn't afford to hire someone to take the letter, but equally, they didn't know anyone halfway across the world who they would need to send a message to, I suppose. I guess, that's true, yeah.

You don't need any of your local people. Yeah. But then sort of like the postal service in, I guess the UK was probably the first postal service. It was like an official government. Yeah, the first official thing. It has existed everywhere at one point or another because people need to communicate.

In this country, I think just because of my personal experience, I'm going to be mainly talking about the UK mail service. In 1516, they set up the master of the posts who was in charge of that whole horse rider system that I just mentioned. Yes. So Royal Mail claimed that it was 500 years old in 2016. Yes. But as you said, that was just for private use. Charles I opened that system up to the public. Again, only the wealthy public, but 1635 it became a public.

thing, wasn't actually named Royal Mail until 1784. No. So it's existed for ages, but it's changed, but it's always been there. Yeah, yeah. I remember when I was young, there used to be three deliveries a day back in the 50s. And I think before that, there were even more. Back in the 1800s, they were doing an hourly delivery between half-past seven in the morning and half-past seven at night.

Really? There would be 12 deliveries a day. I suppose when the letters were fewer and further between, as soon as one arrived, you jolly well went out and delivered it, didn't it? So rather than these days, they all come in in bulk, you know, it would actually be a sort of a moment, wouldn't it? Oh, a letters arrived. Let's go and deliver it quick.

Well, you used to have to pay for it when it arrived. Yes. It was paid for by the receiver rather than by the sender. That's right, yes. So when did that all change? So that all changed. Well, it depends what are you specifically? refer to. So there was a

the system called the London Penny Post came around in 1680. And essentially you could send any item letter or parcel up to a pound in weight and up to 10 pounds in value within the city of London.

That's quite a lot of money. Yes it was got of that back then, yeah absolutely. For one penny. And was that the penny black? No. So this was 1680. That was the London Penny Post. So that was the service by which you could send things for one penny. Right. It wasn't until the 1800s, but the idea of a stamp came up and that was the penny black stamp. Oh, okay. So again, stamps, you know, why they're called stamps. When you used to

send a letter or a parcel through a posting house or a post office, they used to take an ink stamp and stamp the parcel to say, this has been paid for. And then someone came up with the idea of, well, why don't we just put a little bit of paper on the letter or the parcel? Yeah. And it will do the same job and it can be mass produced. Yes. So those things were stamps. And that came about in 1840. There was a gentleman called Roland Hill who created the post office reform between 1837 and much,

much later. He just went around unifying and making this scattered service that ran very differently in different areas. Yes. Sort of making it into one unified thing. National service. National service, exactly. So the penny black only lasted for four months.

Oh, really? And that's why it's rare, is because they didn't produce very many of them. Oh, I see. And the reason why they didn't produce very many of them is you talked about, like, you can cancel a stamp. When you buy a stamp, so you can't reuse it. Yes. They frank it. And they put us like a cancellation mark on the stamp.

What colour was the ink that they used to cancel the penny blacks, do you reckon? Oh, don't tell me it was black. Oh, yeah. Oh, for goodness sake. So basically the reason why they stopped making the penny black after four months was they realised that you couldn't see whether they were cancelled or not. That's brilliant. So they changed it to a penny red.

Yes, they did, that's right. So that's why they changed it to a penny red. Oh, that's wonderful. And you can see a jolly good stamp collection in the British Library in London. They have a number of sheets of penny blacks and reds on this. play there. Beautiful looking things. People have done fun stuff with stamps, though, haven't they? There are some very interesting stamps. I mean, I guess that's what Flatterley is all about. It gets you everywhere.

It'll get you to Bhutan, for example. Right. Back in the day, Bhutan decided that they were going to make mini record stamps. Okay. So there's a chap called Bert Todd, who was trying to raise money. I mean, Generally, countries often raise money by producing special stamps. Yes, okay. So the stamp collectors all over the world have to buy the stamps to keep their collections going. So Bert Todd, who was a bit of an adventurer, went to Bhutan. I'll put a link.

We have show notes if you go to factorily.com. Factorily.com. That's the one. You'll find Bert Todd's story of the Bhutan mini record stamps. Basically, he produced these stamps that you can actually play on a record player. No way. And they played all sorts. They played like the Bhutan National Anthem.

There were some. Like different denominations played different things. That's incredible. So there was on with Burt, sort of telling the story of the stamps and all sorts of. So, yeah, the Bhutan stamps were really quite something. Tonga had, they had a stamp in the shape of a banana. Okay. Because one of Tonka's big exports is the banana.

Right. But then they decided, well, it went down so well. They raised a lot of money by their banana-shaped stamp. they thought okay let's make one in the shape of a heart and then one in the shape of a bird and then an old collection in the shapes of fruit brilliant and even in this country as well you know we get commemorative stamps don't we for particular events

so many we get movie stamps I remember a Doctor Who collection came out you know all these sorts of things the philatolists have no shortage of novelty stamps then you get I mean in Belgium in 2013 they thought we need to need to some more money. So how can we make more money through stamps? And somebody said, what's Belgium famous for? Tintin. Poirot. I know chocolate. Okay. So what we'll do is we'll make

chocolate tasting and smelling stamps. No. Not stamps out of chocolate, but there'll be paper stamps, but we'll make the lacquer that we cover the stamp with. Oh. Smell like chocolate because it'll have chocolate in it. brilliant so they produced a whole load of chocolate stamps which uh when you licked them they tasted of chocolate and when you smelled them they smelled of chocolate and they looked like chocolate they were specially designed that's wonderful i love that they're amazing because stamps do have a fairly unique taste don't they when you well when you used to lick them they're sort of self-adisive these days aren't they but yes yes when you used to have to lick a stamp craggy every every christmas i

remember licking all of these stamps to go on the Christmas cards. At one point the US Postal Service produced a calorie guide for stamps and envelopes. Really? To tell you how many calories there were when you licked a stamp or when you licked an envelope. I've tried to find this out. I mean, I've heard this and I've tried to track it down, but it's a book. It may be apocryphal. Right. We don't care. Apocrypha is truth here. Yes, always. There are so many different areas of this that we could cover. It's a fascinating network. You know, the postal services is sort of one of the biggest infrastructural systems going.

It connects so many things together. It's just absurdly large. But I've just sort of picked out a couple of things that sort of stick out. One of which is post boxes. Oh, yes. So in my time at Royal Mail, I used to do both deliveries and collections. So I went around in a van with a big bunch of keys emptying all the postboxes in a particular area

and scooping the letters out of them to go on their journey. Yeah. So I did a little look around postboxes. There are about 115,000 postboxes in the UK of varying sizes and shapes and types, you know, from the old cast iron pillar box with the little cap to protect it against rain to the rectangular things,

embedded in a wall. Yes. And they're quite interesting in as much that every single box has its own unique key. Oh. For security reasons, if they all have the same key, yes. It would be very easy to suddenly gain access to every single postbox in the country. I never thought of that.

So they all have their own unique key. And if you look at a post box, it has a little code in the corner of the time plate, which says the first part of the postcode followed by three digits. Yeah. So I used to work in the Staines area, TW, 8. So TW18, 501 is a particular box. And you would have a bunch of keys. Every single key would have a fob on it with the number of that box.

So you walked around with this big sort of jangly jailer's keys type bunch of keys, positioned on a hoop in the order that you were collecting in so that you got to the next box, you got that key, you opened the box, etc. Wow. So yeah, we had a lot of keys hanging on a lot of hooks. the office. And yes, they're apparently around 115,000 postboxes, each with their own unique key. All painted red? All painted red now. Well, not all, but yeah. So which ones aren't painted red? Right. So they don't really exist anymore, but you used to get airmail post boxes where you would specifically drop air mail letters. They were blue, light blue. You had dark blue one. that were armed forces-specific postboxes.

You had ones that were painted gold during the Olympics. Yes, I remember those. Any town that a UK gold medal winner came from, their hometown, they could have the postboxes painted gold. Oh, wow. During the war, they painted them camouflage. Yes, they did. Yeah. Because red's very easy to spot from the year.

Now, this is interesting. Apparently, when postboxes first came about, so... We didn't invent them. They were actually being used in Paris in the late 1600s, which is way earlier than I would ever have thought. Yeah. In the 1850s, an English fellow called Anthony Trollope. Well, the writer? Yes.

So he had a previous career as the clerk of works working for the post office. Oh, right. And he was on holiday in France, and he saw all of these post boxes, and he brought the idea back to the UK. At first, they just did a trial run. They had four post boxes on the island of Jersey. And they worked quite well. They were red right from the start. Then they trialled a few on Guernsey.

They worked quite well. Then they came to the mainland and started spreading. Somewhere around the late 1800s, they decided to make them green because they felt that the red ones were just too ostentatious. They sort of stuck out too much. So for about 10 years, all of the postboxes in the country were green. And then people started complaining because they were so unobtrusive that they couldn't actually find. The nearest post box.

So they went back to red and they've been read ever since. I seem to remember, and I haven't researched this, but I think it's true, that the church, I seem to remember that the church objected to the post and especially to post boxes. Right. On the basis that it was immoral. Okay. And the morality bit came in because young single women or even young married women could get in contact with men

surreptitiously through writing them letters and then popping their letter into a postbox Oh dear And because before you would have to come to the house and talk to some of them Yes, of course And so you would see people together

Yeah But what the post did is it separated people away from each other So that you could actually conduct an affair Through the post Interesting And it was You could get up to all sorts of nefarious stuff postally. How interesting. I feel slightly out of touch with raw mail these days, but I read that earlier

this year, they created a handful of solar powered post boxes. I've seen them, yeah. Have you actually seen them in the flesh? Yes. Really? Yeah, yeah. So the idea here is that because so many people are either sending parcels or returning parcels more to the point these days, instead of going to a post office, or your local convenience store parcel shop. You can go to one of these solar powered post boxes, scan a barcode on the side of the box. It then electronically opens a hatch that you can put your parcel into for the postee to take away later on that day.

Which makes so much sense, isn't it? It does. So most of these postboxes, though, are on land, right? Most of them, yeah. Yeah. Because there is one underwater. Is there? So on the island of Vanuatu, well pronounced, they say it's a post office, but actually what it is effectively is a post box.

So you buy a waterproof postcard, you fill it in with a waterproof pen, you go for a swim, and then you can snorkel down underneath the water to a postbox, which is probably about six, seven feet below water level and post your postcard in a postbox. for no better purpose than the sheer novelty yes again it's the postal system making money for for the government right so yeah so if you find yourself in Vanuartu go go and post yourself a uh a postcard underwater that means that in turn the local postee has to be a diver yes that's true so it's opened every day so somebody has to go down there every day and fish out all the postcards literally and and bring them back to shore On the other side of things, of course, you can go into space. Yes. So it started on the MIR space station. The Russian government decided they wanted to raise cash. So they would take mail up to MIR and the astronauts in MIR would frank the stamps. This is to confirm that they have been franked in space and then bring them back down and send them on.

Brilliant. So technically there was a post office. on the mere space station. Wow. And it worked so well that you can still do it at the ISS. Huh. So you can still send post up to the ISS. I think it costs about $20,000 per letter.

So it's not cheap, and it's definitely a thing that only the wealthy can do. Wow. But you can have your mail franked on the ISS. That's fantastic. There's also a floating post office. Is there? In Michigan. Right.

So there's a company called J.W. Westcott, like Westcott. I was going to say that's very similar to your pronunciation of the word waistcoat, isn't it? Yes, yes. So Westcott is the chap who started it about 50, 60 years ago. And there's a boat with its own zip code. Oh, right. Because it's, in the sound of the great place, there's a lot of boats. And people live on them or work on them.

And how do they, they normally had to come into land. go to a post office, pick up their parcels or their mail, and then go back out to the boat. Yeah. So what this guy decided to do was to have a floating post office where he would take the mail from land out to the boats in the Great Lakes. And so that you can order Amazon stuff and you can basically, he'll bring it to your boat. That's brilliant. Yeah. Wow.

It's the only floating post office in the world. What's the most exciting post office? expensive thing you think has ever been posted? Oh, I don't know. I think in official terms, Royal Mail does have an upper limit over which you're not supposed to send things through the post just in case. Yes. So there was something very, very, very, very valuable sent through the post ones.

In South Africa, they discovered the world's biggest perfect diamond. The clarity of it all the way through was amazing. It's called the Kulunan Diamond. It's actually in the Crown Jewels now. Okay, right. But, I mean, this thing is as big as two hamburgers. It's massive. Crikey.

Yeah. It's a huge diamond. Wow. And they thought, how do we get it from South Africa to the cutters in London? Mm-hmm. So what they did was they hired a big security force. And they made a big show of putting it in like a safe. And then they put it onto a boat.

And they had like armed, armed soldiers on the boat, chipping it back from South Africa to the UK. In the meantime, somebody had stuck it in a post, in like a jiffy bag, and posted it back to the UK. Wow. Yeah. The American government decided in about the 1920s that people would no longer be allowed to post children. I beg your pardon. So people used to post children. So it's cheaper than the train.

so if you wanted to send your child off to your auntie or to spend time with a relative you could actually put it in the post there were several occasions where this happened and it got to a point where the europe government decided actually we'd need to stop this that's ridiculous i think they weren't actually put into parcels or anything like that they were just basically had a bit of a paddington type thing going where they had like a Yeah, they just sort of attach a postage label to the said child and off it went. I can't believe that that actually worked, let alone lasted for long enough for someone to say we should stop doing this. It did.

And if you go to our show notes, I'll prove it to you. Wonderful. There was a prisoner in 2006 who was working in a prison in America. And they make mailbags in prison. It's one of the things that they do. So he was on the mailbag. manufacturing thing and he actually manufactured his own mailbag with a like a security pod in it with a with an air supply and what they did was when they

finished with mailbags they chucked them all in like a container so he put himself inside his own mailbag that's brilliant and got himself chucks into a container and then got outside the prison and then cut himself out of his mailbag and escaped and he was free for about 18 months and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties, got their man. As always. As always, they got him about 18 months later. Wow, what an escape.

That's pretty ingenious. Yeah, absolutely. Escape by post, or at least by postbag. When you were working for the post office, did you ever sort of come across any official secrets? Not as such. we knew of a number of celebrities who lived in the area because we regularly delivered their mail. Yes.

But there was a, obviously, there was a major post office secret in the middle of London for quite some time. Okay. The post office tower. I think we may have mentioned this before. I can't remember. Right, which is now the BT Tower. So the BT Tower used to be the post office tower.

Yeah. And it was a official secret. But it didn't appear on maps. But. it's a flipping big tower I can see it on my morning walk it's there that's weird

but it was an official secret right I mean I don't know if you ever went there but there was like there's even like a revolving restaurant this is an official secret with a revolving restaurant on that everyone knows about

that was run by Batlins but sorry so yeah so the restaurant on the top of the post office tower was run by Batlins was it really yeah how strange I'm annoyed that I never got to go there

before it closed It was brilliant. The thing is that it had a central core which was static and then the restaurant revolved around the central core. Yeah. And what that meant was that if you went to the loo, because all the plumbing and everything was in the static central core. Yes. So if you went to the loo, when you came back out of the loo, your table had moved. Oh, I see. So you could end up on stage with one of the acts that was performing or you could just end up at somebody else's completely different table. That's brilliant. You just have to find your way back to your table. depending on how long you'd been in there. Yes, exactly.

Oh, that's great. Have you heard of the mail rail? No, I don't think I've ever heard of a mail rail. So essentially there was an underground train network. Yes, I have heard of it. There you go. I have. I love this.

You can go on it, right? You can go on it now, yeah. So this is fascinating. I'll tell you what, one of the best things you can do if you're even vaguely interested in all of this stuff, please go and visit the Postal Museum in London because it's phenomenal. They just have so much information.

They have examples of equipment and stamps and vehicles. It's phenomenal. And part of it is the mail rail, which you can now ride on. So the mail rail was created in the early 1900s, actually, older than I would have thought. But as the streets of London were getting busier and busier, they wanted to get a way of transporting mail from a post. post office in the west of London to a post office

in the east of London. Yes. What's the obvious thing to do? Underground trains. So they started building this underground network of trains in the early 1900s. They stopped during the First World War, obviously. But it was eventually opened in 1927. Wow. And it was a network

of electric, driverless trains. They sort of resemble miniature railways, I guess, because they weren't designed for people. They were designed to carry mailbags. And these things ran back and forth under the streets of London, all the way up until 2003. Do they go to Mount Pleasant?

Yes. So Mount Pleasant was one of the stops. Paddington, there's a post office there that it used to stop at. It eventually phased out because a lot of those post offices and sorting centres dwindled away and therefore their route wasn't quite so irrelevant. So it eventually stopped. But all the way up until 2003, you had driverless trains

darting back and forth under the streets of London carrying mailbags and they've converted one of them to fit passengers so you can now go and visit one of these underground stations with a whole digital display about the history of the thing you can get in you can well i'm six foot three and it's a bit of a squeeze but you can get in this little miniature have you been i've been of course i've been it's on my list of things to do do it please do it it's so good and it takes you through sort of like a multimedia display of the history of of the mail rail and raw mail as a whole And yeah, you can ride on this little diddy underground train

between a couple of old post office underground stations. Amazing. Isn't that great? That's fantastic. Thank you for bringing that up. You're welcome. So, Simon, can you post any notices about what records there are to do with the post? Yes, I'm sure you could even put records in the post.

Why not? Oh, you could. Yes, there are lots of records. records in this topic. I just picked my top three that I found most interesting. Here we go. You know how people like to do things that are so small it can fit on a

postage stamp? Yes. So there's a record for the highest number of words on an actual functioning in-use postage stamp which is 1,969. So this isn't just a microscopic thing that we've done for science. This is an actual postage stamp that's in use. You could actually read it with like

a very strong microscope. Yeah. This was created by the United Nations. And essentially, this was the opening text to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Oh, how nice. And it was to commemorate the anniversary of that document having been translated into multiple languages. Yeah. And every country that it had been translated into, they got a stamp with that opening declaration written on it in tiny, tiny writing. and the one that happened to have the highest number of words was the English version

1,969 words. So that's a lot of words on a stamp. That is a lot of words. There's a record for the farthest distance travelled by a postage stamp. Have a guess. Well, I would imagine up to the space station. A bit further. Wow.

Okay. Go on then. Just over three billion miles. Is that on Voyager? No, it's on the new horizon. Spacecraft, which left Cape Canaveral in 2006, to go to Pluto. And it had a postage stamp on it. In the hope that there'd be a post office on Pluto.

Who knows what the purpose was? I don't know. But yeah, that postage stamp travelled just over 3 billion miles. Wow. Which is quite good going. Yeah. And then my favourite one, I find this charming. the longest delayed delivery of a letter in Royal Mail's history. Oh, was this one that got sort of like found down the back of some machinery?

Yeah, exactly that. So it didn't sort of go into the precise details of how it was recovered. But in 2008, a delivery office in Dorset found this really old letter that had somehow or other, you know, got stuck down the back of something, as you say. Yes. And never quite delivered. So they delivered it. They put it into a little plastic bag saying, sorry that your item is either delayed or damaged

and delivered it to a lady called Janet Barrett who owned a guest house in Weymouth. And she opened this thing. And this letter was originally dated 1919. Wow. So it was 89 years late in its delivery. And the letter said, Dear Percy, many thanks for the invitation,

would be delighted. See you on the 26. of December regards Buffy oh wow so you know obviously the the address had had a change of ownership and therefore it didn't actually make it to anyone who was in any way connected to it can you imagine if they sort of turned up to that boxing day party and I thought I wonder where Buffy is I guess we'll find out in the 21st century yeah how interesting isn't that great yeah and those are my records fantastic Well, I'm, my post has been delivered.

Yes, my facts have been returned to sender. That was, that was very interesting. I didn't realize the Postal Service could be interesting. Yes. Apparently it is. It is stereotypically dull, but actually, once you start poking, there's, yeah, there's a lot to it. There is an awful lot to it. And you reminded me to go on that trip on the train.

There you go. You're welcome. I will definitely do that. So we should remind you, actually, while you're listening to this, to leave us a review and to give us a rating. So if you think that we are nice and good at what we do, then please give us a five-star review. And if you happen to have some equally nerdy friends who like learning interesting, useless trivia, please point them in our direction and they can come and join the factorialy fraternity. they may well tell you that we got stuff wrong and if they do that you can write to us at hello at factorily.com or you can go to our Facebook page

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