Saturday's Guardian carried a feature by the excellent David McKie warning readers that the Royal Mail planned to delete county names from postal addresses. Royal Mail thinks postcodes are enough, McKie reported.
The feature included pleas from worthies such as Margaret Drabble, Sue Townsend, Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson condemning the move.
I'd not heard of this fiendish plan before. But a moment's thought suggests it could never succeed. When I lived in Teddington in the late 1980s I included Middlesex in my address, even though that county disappeared in 1965 (not 1974 as McKie writes). In Wales, we still regarded Pembrokeshire as a living county after it had been replaced in local government by Dyfed. (And some people still write Dyfed on envelopes after the 'new' county was abolished just a couple of decades later.)
In short, the Royal Mail will have almost no influence over how people write their addresses.
I offer David McKie a better subject for a campaign. Stop politicians messing with our country's geography. The endless reorganisations of local government boundaries have wasted millions of pounds and caused endless confusion.
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