I sent my mum a mother’s day card. Posted it Thursday and she got it today. Actually I didn’t really send it, my wife did so I don’t know if a second class stamp is to blame for it not getting there for the weekend.

Last night I bought a book from Amazon.co.uk. I had the choice of delivery by 1pm on Tuesday for a fiver or 5 day delivery included in the price of the book. The book itself was only £9 so I went for the free option. It will be here by the end of the week I imagine. If I wanted to fork out a one year subscription for Amazon Prime (£49) I could get all my purchases delivered free of charge next day.

I also ordered a new part for my car on Friday. They have promised it will be here on Wednesday. The part was £120 inc VAT so I’m hoping that delivery will be included but I won’t be surprised if it isn’t and I didn’t ask the question.

Last week I also ordered a photo album online. It was on offer.  I paid £70 but got a 30cm x 30cm glossy album with 480 photos in it. That’s 14.5 pence per photo in a high quality binding. Delivery was “free”. The album represents 10 years of digital family photos in the Davies household and is the distillation of 54,000 pics and 160GBytes of hard drive.

Another project is to have a growing pile of junk mail on my desk just to see how high it gets before I recycle the lot.

I note that the volume of letters that we, the nation, send is in decline but at the same time we are the world’s premier online internet economy. This must mean that whilst we no longer write to each other, hastily scribbled Christmas cards and carefully crafted Mother’s day tomes excepted, the demands we are placing on the postal service must surely be growing.

This post was prompted by the Boston Consulting Group report on the “Internet Economy” much talked about today in the media. I’m not going to go into it in detail – it’s really just an update from last year’s report on the same subject and which I covered here. Good to see we are making progress – up £21Bn to £121Bn from last year and now at 8.3% of GDP.  The government would do well to increase investment in this space rather than take up more green belt adding a faster train service between London and Birmingham.

PS I’m looking for a pair of pincers that have a very flat head and can be used to extract guitar frets – I’m renovating my old CSL telecaster copy with one of the kids. Can’t find the exact one I’m looking for online – they photos aren’t typically good enough. Any tips gratefully taken on board.