Wanlockhead

Hello Craig! Came up here (60 miles from Carlisle, believe it or not!) for a good eight mile walk on Saturday. LOve the place – first came here as an eleven year old, and wanted to show it to Doug, who’d come to me for the weekend. See him again mid August for four days at the Edinburgh Festival – we’ve booked for ten Fringe shows! How’s things? Hope you’re well.  John.

– – – – – – – – – –

A new addition that I received a couple of weeks ago from one of the people I’ve known longest in my life. John was my primary school teacher at Belah School in Carlisle between 1981 and 1982. Although we lost touch when I went secondary school I got back in touch in the 1990s and we’ve corresponded irregularly ever since. Now it’s much less a teacher-pupil relationship than it is just ‘old’ friends!

I think this is a good postcard to mention the long-standing tradition of the Royal Mail special postmarks, which have been doing the rounds for decades. On older mail they are much more interesting, design-wise, to be honest, and nowadays they seem to stick to the fairly uninspiring block of text that you see here. It’s a shame, as they are limited, usually to a day or two, and they do make the mail a little bit more exciting. A nice Spitfire motif wouldn’t have gone amiss on this one which is commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. I think it sneaked under the wire as I heard that all post delivered via Royal mail on 16th and 17th July would bear this postmark; this one got in early, postmarked on the 15th.