Endurance

So who knew that a £1.33 stamp was a thing? A stamp that costs £1.33. Not £1.25 or £1.50 but a pound and the odd 33p. I know how it got to this value; it's a function of increasing one of the base-level products and then rippling through a value or percentage increase with some thought of retaining the differentials. The £1.33 postage rate was £1.28 until 30th March, 2015 and that's a strange number too - I could spend time looking back further but I think you get the thrust of my argument; 33p or 28p is odd and in other retail sectors it would have been rounded by now.

Another thing that springs to mind. A friend who lives in Abroad mentioned "remote starters" and I wasn't familiar with this term so I went and checked with Google. For those unaware this is a technology whereby a car engine can be started remotely and run to warm up without the driver leaving their house and without the car being unlocked. The other day there was mention on the wireless of a spate of car thefts in parts of the UK. Owners were starting their cars and then heading back indoors to finish their cornflakes while the car demisted and warmed up. Now it may be a function of where I grew up but I'm not really that surprised when a car which has been left with the keys in and nobody in sight might vanish. Not all of them by any means and not in all areas but I'm pretty sure that if someone has a decent set of wheels and adopts this as a cold weather strategy some folks with acquisitive habits will take notice. TWOCing is in decline but making it easier for folk is simply ridiculous. Because I check this stuff I wanted to make sure that you'd get the TWOC acronym but I now see that it also means "trial without catheter" which I assume is a medical procedure rather than the offence of "taking without owner's consent" - I know more about the latter than the former.

The remote starter links back to the stamp in an obvious way. The subject of these stamps is the ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. They didn't have the best of times having lost his ship; Endurance. It was 100 years ago and I'm sure that had anyone described a remote starter they would have been rather surprised.

It's almost as if I plan this stuff..................