Saturday 28 November 11am – 1pm

Foyles bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0EB

Price: £10/£6

Book online

Who rowed out between islands one evening
Before Christmas, with a white mist censing
The clunk of the boat, the guttural oars
And noise of children playing round the shores.

Silent, lumpy as a berg, the mailbag
Lay at his feet. Under the swatching fog
Perhaps he is content to drift a while:
Those scattered homesteads won’t expect his call.

He seals quietly on the lough. The lamps
Are desultory markers as he gazes.
A child’s called in. The opened door blazes
On to the water. His old head nods. He dozes.

At one in the morning the lough was black.
Fathers awoke to far shouts, the crack
Of an oar on ice and calling of their names
By a late postman, locked out from all their homes.

His voice wailed out the roll-call of his beat.
The water would not open to his knock.
They reached him the next day by ten o’clock
Clad in hard frost, the bag stiff at his feet.

Meanwhile, if you have a dream about your dad being turned into a tray of things – and he wants to push himself off the table because he doesn’t want to be a tray of things anymore – or if you have any such dream that wakes you up and makes you cry!, I think the best idea is to write someone a postcard about it. A dreamy postcard! When we go on holiday we send postcards, so why not when we go on dream? Perhaps there should be a Postcard Dreams service – a national deposit for all our night posts.

Go see Anonymous Postcard – a project that enables you to communicate via a third party

Go see Tucker Nichols’ website

When I do send letters, I feel great. I know they won’t arrive just yet (so there’s that time between sending and receiving when you can be happy knowing someone will receive something they didn’t know they would get) and I know when they will arrive, they will be a surprise. A disturbance of the day. Something to remember! To Hold In Your Hands!

So it’s about a feeling, then. But if we know what makes us feel great (sending post to people), why are we so stalled writing letters at the moment? Why are our postal workers on strike but no one’s reporting it in the press? Why do they have to strike in the first place? I think it’s something to do with value. How we value a way of feeling, the nature of surprises.

O, there is such sadness at the heart of Post currently!

Jonathan Jones at the Guardian wrote this – which has some lovely references to post:

What does not always come across in Beuys’s large sculptures is his humour. Bits and Pieces nicely leavens our sense of Beuys. There is a joyous poem-letter about his favourite foods, reminiscent of Günter Grass’s novel The Flounder in its celebration of earthy pleasure. There are postcards made out of wood, and evidence of Beuys’s fandom of the bank robber John Dillinger. Bits and Pieces is a loving archive of one of the 20th century’s great artists, and we are lucky to have it.