Letter to a bureaucrat
Sir: Col. Strix should count the blessings of his bureaucrats (18 October). Postcodes, I guess, are to be occupant-group personalised. We at Stinkwort Cottage are labelled RG9 5DL, whereas those famous ones at Stinkwort (House) take the code, he says, RG9 5DN. For myself I have the hope that at the end of the day the postcode will obliterate the need for outmoded fancy symbols of house name and street number.
The name Stinkwort is a trouble to live up to amongst the many friends who know of its great connections and with those of my acquaint- ance less versed, a worry to live down. Indeed, when I first took occupancy of this heredita- ment, after a little flutter in the Scottish prac- tice of excambion, I thought to change its name to something more intelligible, humdrum and equally obsolete, such as 27 Grosvenor Square: intelligible perhaps only to Strix and me. His grandfather bought it from mine.
Archie Gordon Stinkwort Cottage, Lower Moleheap, Dogsdirt- on-Thames, Loms. RG9 5DL
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