British readers, please help. I’m reading a new book by Sophie Hannah, and there is something I’m not getting.
Is it true that there are red rubber bands lying everywhere in the streets in your country? If so, why? Where do they come from and what do they mean?
I can’t concentrate on the mystery because I keep wondering about these rubber bands. Are they a metaphor of some sort that I’m not getting?
Yes Clarissa, the rubber bands are used by the post office to keep bundles of mail together, untidy posties discard them once the bundle is delivered. Tidy posties, like my son-in-law, take them home and use hundreds to construct bouncy balls for their kids!
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“untidy posties discard them once the bundle is delivered”
Are rubber bands not…. resusable in the UK? I don’t like to brag, but I’ve used the same rubber band three, four, maybe five times without feeling the need to throw it away.
That is weeeeeeirrrd
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In the book, a character collects these bands and makes a ball out of them as an anxiety reducing mechanism.
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Considering that shops sell “loom bands” to kids in five hundred and one thousand quantities, I’d say that rubber band conservation is not high on the list of British priorities …
But if the rubber bands were shaped like something kids would find fun, I suspect the streets would be picked clean of them. 🙂
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There may also be a design issue, if large deep practical pockets are no longer ‘fashionable’ and new uniform design features shallow ‘trendier’ pockets… then rubber bands fall out. And you don’t hear them fall.
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Royal Mail used to have red rubber bands round bundles of post.
I don’t drop litter in the street but apparantly some posties do. When I worked for Royal Mail my coat pockets were full of rubber bands.
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Well, I’ve learned a new word from this discussion. Posties. Posties chomp pasties. I totally speak British. 🙂
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We’re so chuffed to hear that you’re getting it. 🙂
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Or even better: pasty posties chomp pasties.
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Yes, but do pasty Cornish posties chomp Cornish pasties?
Well, of course they do, and that’s why some of them are a bit pear-shaped. 🙂
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As a student, I used to work as a postman in the holidays. But our rubber bands in Sweden used to be brown. And I also made bouncy balls from them!
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And what pray tell is a “postie”? Is it the letter carrier (person) or the person receiving the mail?
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The postie is the person who delivers mail to homes and workplaces. They have stopped using red rubber bands in my area, they now drop dozens of brown ones.
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I think they stopped using distinctive red rubber bands so they have plausable deniability.
Anyone could have dropped a brown rubber band, so you can’t blame Royal Mail for the rubbish.
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Now that we’ve solved the prosaic question of the rubber bands, I do hope they are also a metaphor for something in the story!
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When I get to the end of the novel, I’ll share!
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On “holiday”, I found a bookshop that sells an inexpensive rubber band shooter that comes pre-packaged with Royal Mail Red rubber bands and is also coloured Royal Mail Red …
By “holiday” in double quotes, I mean “an extended stay in a place you thought you would enjoy, but after having the intellectual un-welcome mat rolled out for you, you’d rather focus on work and getting back on the plane as soon as is favourable”, so obviously accumulating a bunch of possibly regulated toys I’d have to clear through airport security isn’t a priority.
Hopefully they’re available somewhere else in my upcoming travels.
I’ll keep you “posted” … 🙂
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If you work for the Royal Mail, pinging the rubber bands at anyone is a sackable offence.
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I’m getting a lot of messages like these when I click on posts. First time something like this has happened. Started with the ‘Social Engineering’ post, but I thought that maybe the antivirus software flagged the words ‘social engineering’, but now I’m getting the same message on other posts as well. This is my school computer, though, which has a different antivirus software than the one on my laptop. If it happens on my laptop too, I’ll let you know.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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