In the 70s and early 80s, my peers would take off, after graduating, to somewhere exotic (e.g., Far East, S.E.Asia, South America) and travel around (often for a whole year), before coming back to the UK and then start looking for a job.
(From the second half of the 80s, people would start looking for a job even before they went into their final year. Companies would do the Milk Rounds of universities, recruiting. Google: Milk Round — a series of visits to universities and colleges by recruiting staff from large companies.)
After having done China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Simon went to India for a few months, buying stamp albums along the way. As they were heavy, Simon decided to post them back to England rather than lug them around India.
He went into a post office in a small place (small town?). This was the dialogue:
Simon: I want to send these back to England by post. What are the different ways, and which is the quickest?
Man at the Post Office (Simon narrated this bit with a heavy Indian accent, complete with the shaking of the head): There’s sea mail, which is the cheapest but the slowest. They can go by land as well, but the fastest is ROCKET!
Simon chose ROCKET.
He got back to England some three months later, and the parcel still hadn’t arrived.
A bit later, the parcel sent by ROCKET post finally reached England. It was stamped all over — it had obviously worked its way up the chain, from small town post office to the next, bigger one, and so on, probably around half of India. It was a little bit frayed at the edges, but nothing was missing otherwise.
(India, 1982? / 1983?)
