Wedding invitations that never got there and the question: Why does Royal Mail offer such a second-class service?

FIRST the pandemic forced our eldest son and his fiancee to postpone their wedding. Now Royal Mail and the Post Office appear to be doing their damnedest to scupper the great occasion, which has finally been fixed for mid-August.

Bear with me while I set out the facts as I understand them, and I’ll leave you to decide where the blame rightfully belongs. You may well have suffered a similar experience yourself.

Our tale of woe begins on Wednesday, April 6, when my future daughter-inlaw Stella went to the Post Office near her work to buy stamps for the wedding invitations.

This was two days after the price of a second-class stamp rose by 2p to 68p, while that of a first-class stamp shot up by 10p to a blistering 95p. Call that 19 shillings in the days of my 1950s childhood, when that sum would have bought you no fewer than 91 stamps for next-day delivery, at 2½d each.

Unsurprisingly, Stella opted for secondclass, figuring that with more than three months to go, it wouldn’t matter if the invitations took a couple of extra days to reach the guests. She bought 96 of them — about 60 for the invitations, the rest for thank-you letters in anticipation of wedding presents.

Mysterious

At £65.28, the bill represented a saving of £25.92 on first-class stamps, which would have set her back £91.20. This was an economy not to be sneezed at, for a struggling couple as hard-up as George and his intended.

(Since Stella is Canadian, she bought other stamps separately for invitations to her near and dear across the Atlantic. They cost her £2.35 each, but they needn’t concern us here.)

Now fast forward to April 20, when Stella finally got round to posting those 60-odd invitations, passing them over the counter at the Post Office round the corner from her London home.

‘I handed them over stamped,’ she says, ‘but checked with the teller that the postage was all fine for the size and weight. The teller said yes, totally fine, and they would arrive in three to five days.’

All right, she and George could have sent the invitations by email.

But they agreed, rightly in my view, that for an occasion as special as a wedding, there’s no substitute for a stiffy on the mantelpiece.

The next we heard of it was last week, when son number two, who lives with his wife in North London, said that no, they hadn’t received their invitation, but a card had been posted through their letterbox saying that a mysterious communication was waiting for them at their local Post Office.

They could pick it up, they were told, on payment of a £1.50 surcharge, since it had been sent with insufficient postage. Sure enough, this turned out be that ill-starred invitation.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law in Dumfries had the same story to tell. Her son, who lives in the same town, also had to cough up that accursed £1.50. And so did my two sisters, who live in Battersea, South London.

Now, my first instinct was to think that Stella must indeed have used the wrong stamps. As a Canadian, she was perhaps unaware of Royal Mail’s infuriatingly complex pricing system, under which nowadays letters are charged according to the size of the envelope — though if so, it was surely extremely remiss of the Post Office clerk to tell her that everything was tickety-boo.

But I did her a grave injustice. To check out my suspicions, I measured the envelope in which my own invitation arrived, when George and Stella delivered it by hand.

Complete with contents — one invitation and two sheets of useful information about the venue, dress code etc — it was 230mm x 163mm, and 3mm deep. This was comfortably within the 240mm x 165mm x 5mm permitted for a standard second-class stamp. It weighed in at 27g, again well within the 100g limit allowed.

Bespoke

There had to be some other explanation. But what?

My mind then turned to the thin strip of silver ribbon which the artistic Stella had tied in a bow around the invitation and the two sheets of info.

Indeed, a Post Office spokesman tells me: ‘We have on occasion had similar occurrences in the past where bespoke invites have been made with things, such as a bow, tied around them and because of this it can impact the depth of the envelope.

‘Postmasters, and their staff, are trained to look out for anything that may be tied to an envelope that could affect the amount of postage required in order for the envelope to be sent and will show customers that a bow tied around an envelope will not be classed as a standard letter.’ Royal Mail tells me much the same.

Just one problem with that. As Stella confirms, all the ribbon bows were tied inside the envelopes, whose depth still measured no more than 5mm.

This suggests to me that the Post Office clerk may have been blameless in giving the invitations the all-clear, while the fault may lie squarely with Royal Mail. Its own spokesman promises to make every effort to get to the bottom of the matter — but as we all know, the wheels of our postal service grind exceedingly slowly.

Now, you may say I’m making a lot of fuss over very little, but I ask you to put yourself in my future daughter-in-law’s shoes. If she paid the right postage, as I firmly believe she did, then it’s highly embarrassing for her that everyone closest to her and George has been told that she didn’t.

Indeed, I’d class the stickers that have appeared on the envelopes as an insulting libel: ‘Amount due £1.50. Reason: the sender did not pay the full postage.’

Nuptials

Then there’s the question of how many of the invited guests actually bothered to go to the Post Office to collect the envelopes for which they were told they’d have to pay.

I know that I wouldn’t have. Indeed, one of my sisters tells me she once queued half the morning to pay the surplus charge for an underpaid letter — only to find that it was junk mail from a charity pleading for donations.

If Stella hadn’t been tipped off about what had happened, she might have been left with only a handful of guests on her big day — most of them Canadians, whose invitations travelled 3,500 miles without a hitch.

As it is, the poor girl has gone to all the trouble and expense of notifying everyone she can reach by email. Meanwhile, she has run off another batch of invitations, bought yet more stamps — and sent the whole lot off again.

Royal Mail, whose profits quadrupled to £726million last year, is doing very nicely out of her and her guests, what with all those stamps and surcharges.

It’s doing pretty nicely out of me, too, since muggins here has volunteered to meet the extra costs involved, on top of the fortune I’ve shelled out for the venue and the grub.

(Ah, whatever happened to that fine old sexist convention under which it was always the bride’s family who paid for the nuptials? Indeed, I well remember my mother telling me, when our fourth child turned out to be yet another boy: ‘Oh, well, at least you won’t have to pay for any weddings!’ Ho, ho.)

But away with such ignoble thoughts! I rejoice with all my heart that Stella is to join our family, and look forward eagerly to the happy day. If the couple’s plans can survive a pandemic, they can surely survive even the worst that our wretched postal service can throw at them.

But how many others, I wonder, have similar stories to tell?