On the demise of snail-mail

Royal Mail is pretty good. It's not unusual to post something first-class and have it arrive nationally the very next day. Naturally, sending mail overseas takes longer; for instance, to Canada and the US, about a week. Rather than write letters to my daughter while she is miles from me, with news that will be old by the time she receives it, I decided to write her a story and send a page each day. So imagine my surprise when she received page 4 three days after I mailed it, then two days later pages 2 and 3 (which were mailed together), and finally the next day page 1! Thanks to the peculiarities of snail-mail she was forced to read the story backwards.

I don't know how it'll work this week. Obviously I should have emailed her the pages, as I do with just about everything else. Take, for instance, our removals folks: they send us forms by email, which we complete using a word processing package, then email back along with any scanned documents required. England may have a stellar postal service but is it truly necessary in this day and age?