Pushing the Envelope

I can still remember a moment back in the 70s when I was a postie in Bournemouth. I’d strolled up the path to a front door in a quiet suburb, mid morning and not a soul about. I suppose I must have been daydreaming as there were no pocket radios then. I was shoving the post through the letter box when suddenly there was a huge bark and a crashing sound to my right. I was startled, to say the least, by the sight of a huge dog slowly sliding down the window (unbroken) like one of those cartoon dogs. It didn’t like posties.

But the worst dogs were the quiet ones. You soon learnt the houses where no matter how surreptitiously you approached the door, no matter how stealthily you pushed the envelopes through the letter box there would be sharp teeth aimed at your fingers.

Jack the Nipper

I say shoving the post through the letter box but I cannot recall any difficulty in actually doing that part of the job but over the years since then I’ve helped deliver envelopes and leaflets for all sorts of activities and certainly more recently I’ve noticed that the letter boxes themselves have become a nightmare to push the envelopes through.

They can be placed so low to the ground that you risk a hernia kneeling down and getting up or they can be so stiff to open that you can bruise your knuckles when suddenly the things drop through and that’s if you can get past the bristles guarding the inside of the thing in the first place. Sometimes they are both.

The mention of Bournemouth above reminds me of the time leading up to Christmas. Sometimes, if the normal postie was off sick, I would do his delivery which included lot of the hotels. But he would drag himself in no matter how he felt. I found out later that was because every hotel would give him a bottle of his favourite whisky.

Anyway, back to envelopes and pushing. Well, I wouldn’t have been pushing what is considered the first envelopes as they were not made of paper. The first ever example came from ancient Babylon, where messages were written on clay tablets and then baked until hardened. To protect the contents the tablet was then coated with more clay and baked again. These clay envelopes protected documents such as deeds, mortgages, financial accounts and letters, and recipients opened the envelope by breaking the outer layer of clay. Actually I suppose I could have just dropped it through a letter box.

Babylonian billet-doux?

Before paper was invented other methods were used to protect documents and in the Middle Ages there was a growth of a sort of envelope that was just a folded piece of paper sealed with wax. But the big step forward was during the Industrial Revolution when the envelope in its current form was invented by British paper merchant KS Brewer from Brighton. In 1820, he sold the first envelopes, cutting each one by hand using a template and a shoemaker’s knife. In 1845, engineer Edwin Hill and inventor Warren De La Rue were granted a British patent for the first envelope-making machine, although it took another half a century before a commercially successful machine for producing pre-gummed envelopes, like those in use today, appeared.

I wonder if Hill and De La Rue used to speak or write to each other and/or their staff using the cringeworthy jargon that is used in certain spheres of business. I had always thought that the phrases were made up for tv or radio comedy programmes until I was in a meeting a few years ago and a senior manager uttered the words ‘let’s try some blue sky thinking’. I can’t tell you how much I didn’t want to do this.

Here’s my effort:

Mission Statement

To avoid a dead cat bounce
we need lines to reach out
so we all take membership
have our ducks in a row
by taking a helicopter view
and if that means brainstorming
let’s make it happen
then the synergy we produce
will clear the low hanging fruit
that’s just outside the box
letting blue sky thinking
touch base offline
to give us a heads up
sure that we’re on the same page
when we are punching a puppy
who’s been pushing the envelope.

Terry Q.