Life needs more whimsy.

In the newly-minted city of Bangor, County Down, there is a heritage trail carved into the paving, highlighting nearby objects and sites of interest. Here’s a representative sample:

It’s slightly hard to make out in that photo, but the left-most panel has some text written around a whimsical circle:

One of Two Edward VIII Post Boxes

The capitalisation and occasionally boldened words are, I regret, entirely the Council’s choices.

Edward VIII reigned for only 326 days, before abdicating so that he could marry a divorcée, Wallis Simpson. In 1937, it would have been unthinkable for the Head of the Church of England to be married to a divorced woman, something which wasn’t a barrier for the current occupant of the post. Religious doctrine may present a sheen of timelessness, but it’s shifted an awful lot over the last century.

For our purposes, this means that there aren’t that many Edward VIII postboxes—though even so, I was surprised by the ‘of two’—surely there are more than two of the things?!

A moment’s research reveals that I’m right: 161 of them were installed, of which perhaps half remain. So perhaps the engraving refers to Edward VIII post boxes in Northern Ireland.

A bit more searching, and I’m satisfied: there appears to be a much-celebrated example in Belfast—so celebrated, in fact, that’s it’s been removed from service and placed on display with a special plaque.

And isn’t that nice? Both of the Northern Irish Edward VIII postboxes have special plaques pointing out their unusual nature. Bravo. I’m satisfied.

Or so I thought.

The plaque on the Belfast example makes a startling claim: it says it is the only example in Northern Ireland. How can this possibly be?

Back to Bangor. As it turns out, the heritage trail is referring to this, on the front of Bangor Post Office:

This is a remarkable Edward VIII royal cypher on the front of a Post Office… but it isn’t a postbox. The clue is in the lack of a slot.

It used to be common for Post Offices to have cyphers on them, in much the same way as post boxes. As Post Offices are less common than post boxes, there are far fewer Edward VIII Post Offices than postboxes.

Therefore, the heritage trail could have made the much more impressive claim that this was Northern Ireland’s only Edward VIII Post Office. Instead, it made a less impressive claim, and in so doing, revealed the Council’s inability to recognise a postbox.

Today’s lesson is that you shouldn’t trust everything you see on the floor.

This is a branch of an estate agency in Gosforth which specialises in “rare” properties, in the sense of properties that are in someway unusual and hence infrequently available on the property market. Wendy, as someone from Northern Ireland, finds the name particularly amusing, as the word “rare” has negative colloquial connotations in Northern Ireland: somebody dressed in an unusual and inappropriate way, for example, might be described as looking a bit “rare”.

You may think that this long-winded explanation removes any scintilla of humour that might exist about an agency advertising itself as listing only unpleasant properties, but I’m sure we’ll continue to smile as we walk past. And maybe, occasionally, we might continue to tease one another with the line: “That’s the shop where I found you!”

This is a duck house in Bangor’s 37 acre Ward Park, where I came to see Snow Patrol in 2010. In the park, that is, not in the duck house. It’d be a bit of a squeeze to fit a crowd of 40,000 in a duck house, after all.

As spotted at the Bangor Castle Diamond Jubilee Party this afternoon.