Readers' letters - December 16

What a brilliant strategy from the Post Office counter staff – holding the customers to ransom and holding virtually a week-long strike on the busiest week before Christmas.

The customers are already feeling hard done by with the price of postage stamps, so maybe we customers should also go on strike to protest over the inflated cost of postage stamps.

I know many Post Office counter staff who are so miserable with doing their 
job now they want the customers (who they should value a lot more) to also feel the ‘festive bah humbug spirit!’

If it isn’t the Post Office going on strike, it’s the Royal Mail! Or both of them together. They are also whingeing that hardly anyone is sending Christmas cards.

Can they not see why people have stopped buying their postage stamps?

They’re too expensive.

Me thinks the Government, the Royal Mail and the Post Office are “colluding” and every time they see an opportunity, they hike up 
the prices of their postage stamps.

Where’s the logic in this?

Oh well, if I can’t change things for the better, I’ll just say a Merry Christmas Humbug to the Royal Mail 
and the Post Office counter staff.

Thanks for disrupting our letters, Christmas cards, and our parcels the week before Christmas.

From Ebenezer Scrooge!

Darryl Ashton

Address supplied


humour

Jokes to make you smile


I lunched today in the café of a department store.

When the waitress brought me my meal, she asked if I would like salt and pepper. She was thus offering me condiments of the season.

I realise that I hadn’t enough money to pay, so I dashed to a nearby cash machine.

There I was showered in cinders.

Then I realised that it was a freak ash withdrawal ATM.

Neil Swindlehurst

via email

animal welfare

Factory farm secrets


We are often described as a nation of animal lovers.

It would be more accurate to say we are a nation of pet lovers (mainly dogs, cats and budgies) because we kill millions of animals every 
year.

(And I suspect we have not been told the truth about some aspects of factory farming).

We humans exploit animals for our own ends, so we should stop sentimentalising ourselves.

Television gets almost everywhere, these days, but they don’t seem to get much access to our largely secret treatment of animals.

I am not a veggie but I did stop eating beef, lamb and rabbit years ago.

And I am from an old-style farming background.

Max Nottingham

Address supplied


democracy

Four or 200 per cent?

Theresa May thinks that “the will of the people” requires only a four per cent majority to instigate major constitutional reform and great political, social and economic uncertainty, yet trade unions need 200 per cent to trigger mildly-inconvenient industrial action.

John Hall

Address supplied