The Spectator’s Notes | 18 December 2010

Last year, we stopped sending Christmas cards. We are not sending them this year either. I still feel guilty about it: friends take the trouble to send such nice ones. Part of the problem — as well as laziness — is technology. Emails make one extremely conscious of the number of separate operations required by ‘snail mail’. You need the card (whose choice is also a complicated matter), the envelope, the addresses, the stamp, the pen, the post box, and the energy to write your name hundreds of times. This all seemed worthwhile when one had confidence in the postal system. But ever since the abolition of the ‘second’ post (which was really the abolition of the first post), and the decision to pay its then chief executive, Adam Crozier, more than £1 million a year, the Post Office has become demoralised. In the recent snow, we received nothing for a week.