sweasel.com

See? Googly eyes *do* make everything better.

What I like best about this one (in Brockley, London) is that the eyes appeared first. Then later, eyebrows. Then later, teef. Meaning either several people had fun with it, or one person perfected his vandalism slowly over time.

Yep, we still do have these iconic letterboxes all over the country, in several styles and shapes. You can tell the era of a letterbox by the name of the monarch cast into it, beginning with Victoria.

I love these things. Uncle B has a special lobe of his brain devoted to the location of post boxes. Which is impressive, as they are sometimes stranded in the damnedest places as neighborhoods have changed.

They never move them, I guess because it’s hard to. Sometimes they’re in spots that would be suicidal for motorists to stop.

Sadly, thieves move them rather a lot. We’ve had a wave of post boxes lost to scrap metal collectors in the last few years — including, I’m sorry to say, the one closest to us. We all made a point to use the local one because a posting point makes us a proper village. They promised us they’d replace it but they haven’t and I don’t believe they really will.

Metal theft was a terrible issue locally for a while. Farmers were losing gates (and hence livestock) and underground water pipes. Our local church painted all its exterior metal with Smart Water — a forensically traceable, invisible paint that gets all over thieves. Clever stuff. It works, too.

Oh, hey — did you see that the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign that hung over Dachau got nicked? So either there’s a rich pretend Nazi out there with the sign on his wall, or — and you have to love the irony of this one — Romanian scrap thieves nicked it for salvage.