![]() ![]() Yet I’m aware that stamps inspire strong feelings. I don’t do Christmas cards, kidding myself that my preference for digital communication is about saving trees rather than rank indolence. I’m still working through the leftovers from the wedding invitations I sent out seven years ago. I can’t remember the last time I needed a stamp. “I hope it finds you!” she says in a text. In perhaps the lowest-stakes act of sedition ever committed, Johnson writes me a letter, covers the code with one of her protest stickers and pops it into her local postbox. “He made me do it!” she says, practising her defence. “It would be quite an act of defiance, wouldn’t it?” she says. “This is my mini private protest,” she says.īut, until I suggest it, Johnson has not yet dared deface an outgoing coded stamp. She now adds the stickers, which bear an image of a red postbox, to the code before she files letters away in their envelopes. ![]() When letters started arriving bearing the carbuncle codes, Johnson asked a printer friend to make her some stickers to cover them so that only the section of stamp featuring the Queen’s head could be seen. She is also reminded of the way the Prince of Wales once described a National Gallery extension as “ a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” – except this time the “elegant friend” is the Queen. “But the whole point of my society was to give us a break from having to be engaged with digital content,” says Johnson, 49, from her home in Swanage in Dorset. Royal Mail describes the change as a postal “reinvention” that connects stamps to the digital world for a new generation. Swapping definitives, which can still be done after the deadline, is free but will involve downloading and printing a form, or requesting one by phone or letter, and posting it to Royal Mail along with the old stamps. Christmas and other themed special stamps will remain valid indefinitely. Any old stamps must be used before then or traded in. Photograph: PAįrom 1 February 2023, only the new stamps will be accepted. The first adhesive postage stamp … the Penny Black, launched in 1840. ![]()
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