FICTION/MEMOIR/TRAVEL is the convenient catch all classification that the publishers have placed on the back cover of all the novels by the German writer W.G. Sebald. In several of his books Sebald includes snippets of found photographs, obscure diagrams, snaps that he has taken himself (in black and white) and old postcards that he has picked up on his various excursions. These pictures don’t help with the clarity of the writing at all, but they add another layer to the story he is telling, an authentication.
Have the photographs been created to justify the fiction? Is what Sebald is describing really what you are looking at in the badly creased image or is he making it up?
The pressure to get any postal dispute settled quickly. The standard rabid headlines of credit card misery and delayed pensioners, the horror financial reports of massive losses and bloated pension funds. The media reaction has made me realise how much of a core to all forms of communication the postal system is. It can be presented as a twee old fashioned concept but when the chips are down control of the Royal Mail nee Post Office is still a critical part of contemporary life.
Provoked by another threat of postal privatisation as floated by Government earlier this year. I wanted to show support, humorous and heartfelt, for the whole system of postage and letter writing in an era of fast, and flimsy, technology. Not sentimental, but something that said “It’s a complex system that works OK. It doesn’t need to be mucked around with or sacrificed to accountancy fashion.”
As a daily, on-street symbol of this struggle, pillar boxes look increasingly fragile and vulnerable. I want to put my arms around them. Hug them dearly, they are my contact with friends and family. I wanted to make sure that they survive through the cold winds of winter, metaphoric and real. Post boxes, and by extension the postal workers need a small sign to show that their daily labours are acknowledged and appreciated. To show that they are loved. A warm statement that causes no damage. A cosy demonstration of thanks.
This group photograph will be a complex, guerilla collaboration between myself, the knitting circle, autonomous postal workers and a lighting crew. The over lit congregation celebrating a fluffy post box will be chanced upon by nightime revellers. Hopefully it will be a slice of irrational magic and humble warmth, the kind of thing darkness induces. Closer to fiction than fact. A very short, millisecond memorial; an acknowledgement of the long history and future importance of the postal service and those that work in it. Treasuring a threatened form of communication.
After all the attention the post box cosy will be left in place, a portent for a further, unexplained rash of copycat knitted cosy actions.
