If you venture to the Notes side of your Substack app, or you’ve recently been on Threads, you’ve probably seen the “5 things I could talk about for 30 mins with no prep” trend (I say probably because in this week’s
episode I said “everyone’s talking about tech stacks” and we got messages saying “I’ve never heard the phrase tech stack in my life” and now I’m doubting every single thing I assume to be normal or ubiquitous).It does what it says on the tin: you list out the 5 things you could talk about for half an hour when put on the spot (*Nick Miller voice* NO NOTES?) The general vibe seemed to be that you could include something related to your work, but that it couldn’t just solely be your work, because that made the question less fun. Here’s what I came up with:
By and large the one that garnered the biggest response was not, ahem, number 2, the most overtly related to this newsletter and also kinda the basis for my MA dissertation of which I am most proud, but number 4: postcodes.
So let me be clear: I fucking love postcodes.
During university, I worked in a bra shop (the birthplace of some of the most formative and foundational female friendships of my life, let me tell you). At the till, we had to ask people for their postcode to bring up their customer profile, and I loved trying to (in my head) guess the area before it auto populated on screen. On occasion, I got it right; most often, I got it wrong, and I used to love googling the area after they’d left (and I’d done all my other work, of course…)
In the job I worked after that, one of my bosses, a gorgeous lady called Cat, told me that her native Ireland had only just got postcodes!!! In fact, before that, local posties had to remember which family lived where, because an absence of house names or numbers meant that over 600,000 Irish premises had non-unique addresses. More often than not, they did remember. Sometimes, the envelopes were cryptic clues that would have given NYT Connections a run for their money — but, amazingly, and full props to Irish posties, they got where they needed to go.
And don’t get me STARTED on the Postal Museum. Hydraulic tubes? Mail Rail? The game where you see if you’d have made it as a post sorter in the early 1900s (I’d have smashed it)? The best day out ever — unless you’re 6 foot+, in which case, just as a PSA, the Mail Rail will be a squeeze.
Back in 2021, when I started reading again after a 15-or-so-year hiatus, I stumbled upon Deirdre Mask’s The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth and Power. I raced through it, from the slums of Kolkata to the mega mansions of Manhattan and everything in between. It was a gorgeous exploration of history and humanity, and though it wasn’t focussed on them in particular, it typified exactly why I love postcodes so much.
Postcodes are a system that we have in place and might not often think about, but that actually connect us all with the rest of the country. I might not know what my friend’s house in Cupar (KY15) looks like, how to get to it or, let’s be honest, where it even is on a map (geography is not my strong suit), but I can send something there that I know will make its way to her (and if it doesn’t, it’s probs not the postcode’s fault).
And look, I’m no fool; postcodes aren’t perfect. You can call me crazy, but I love that about them too. Postcodes are a noble attempt at making sense of something that can’t quite be made sense of. They work for the most part: L for Liverpool, B for Belfast, HU for Hull, and so on; or the London ones as the compass points1 (bar NE, which was canned in the late 1800s for some reason).
But some postcodes are vestiges of times gone by, like the Rochester postcode. RO for Rochester? No no. KE for the county it’s in? Non! It’s ME for Medway, a name I’d only heard from when my doctor friends got sent there for F1 & F2 placements, but that I now know more about because I’ve got a curiosity and a sense of adventure and a HUGE, NERDY LOVE OF POSTCODES SOHELPMEGOD.
So next time you’re writing or printing out a label or address, take a noment to ponder the postcode. Picture it in your mind’s eye. What questions does it give you? (And if the answer is none, or perhaps more accurately “Ellie what are you on about?” That’s ok too. We can’t all love the same things.)
But for the two (2) people who asked me to expand on my love for postcodes: thank you, and there you have it.
If you live abroad, how do postcodes/ZIPcodes work in your country?
And also: what would the 5 things you could talk about for 30 mins with no prep be?
With London postcodes, N1/SW1/W1 etc are generally where the sorting offices are or were, then the numerical order of the postcodes after that follows the alphabetical order of the areas. Cool, huh?
Thanks for sharing your love of post codes! I enjoy the the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Patch, where they use a random postcode generator to come up with a postcode they are going to visit and they come up with all kinds of random interesting stories.