Sir, – After queuing yesterday at our local post office to pay €20 for a book of stamps, I declined the polite offer of a receipt, thinking the stamps are all the receipt I need. It was only when I got home that I looked at my purchase, to be consternated by the thought that I had blundered into a toy store and obtained a spare for some board game in which children play at operating a mail service.
The “stamps” were utterly unofficial-looking, and bedecked in juvenile coloration with phrases such as “Sending Hugs” and “Ho Ho Joy”.
Of course, we no longer are surprised when our State bodies jump on the secularisation bandwagon of God-cancelled “culture”.
Christmas has always been special for children, but it was so without the vulgarity of this infantilisation.
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Let us hope that no one will be so thoughtless as to disgrace our country by combining several of these stamps to make up the postage to some overseas destination.
I for one, will still have some of these stamps when Christmas has passed, but I shouldn’t have to worry that, for example, my stern complaint about a shoddy service or goods might be delivered in an envelope decorated gaudily with the merely mischievous question “Naughty or Nice?” – Yours, etc,
FRANK FARRELL,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.