With the travel in stamp prices forthcoming in to force on 30 April, many of us will have no choice but to branch up the additional cash. But Graham Eccles of Bude in Cornwall has motionless to offer his local residents a cheaper, substitute postal service .
Launched on 1 April, the Penny Farthing Post is a letter service with a difference: letters around locale are privately delivered by Eccles on his penny farthing bike. The stamps. written and printed by the postman himself, cost 25p " a saving of 35p on the new first-class stamp price.
"When we listened about the rises, we realised that my idea, that was primarily only directed at tourists, had legs," says Eccles. "Three weeks in we broach around 100 letters a day."
Eccles primarily printed only 480 stamps. Within two days they had sole out and the local shops that deed as his post offices, selling stamps and pciking up things for delivery, were clamouring for more. "At the finish of my initial week, we was dropping to bits. we wasn't used to cycling 15 miles a day, and my penny farthing indispensable a new back wheel."
"The greeting has been nothing but positive," he says. "I'm right away conceptualizing post boxes done from converted gas bottles " embellished splendid yellow to prevent difficulty with the Royal Mail ."
For the time being, Eccles sorts the letters in his kitchen ("hair-raising when the kids wish to help") but his mental condition is to have his own post office in the centre of locale with his partner, Jayne, as postmistress. "I wish to urge on the younger era to admire the written word. Everyone's flourishing up with outrageous thumbs from texting but reception a letter is special."