Heading for a sticky end

There are some very striking new stamps out this week from the Post Office. They show colour photos of 10 different fruit and veg, each dramatically outlined on a white background. The fruit include an apple, a strawberry, a pear and an orange. Oh, and a lemon. The vegetables comprise a potato, a Brussels sprout, an aubergine and a red pepper. Oh, and a tomato. Should do wonders for the British diet.

And it's pretty democratic, being five of each, unless you are of the pedantic school of thought that insists that a tomato is a fruit. Who was it who once said that knowledge consists of knowing that a tomato is a fruit, and wisdom consists of not putting it in a fruit salad? Well, it was me, actually. Thank you.

Some of the fruit have rather protruding stalks which unbalance the composition, and the stamps actually allow for this by letting the stamps have extra sticking out bumps to contain the full stalk. I have never seen a British stamp before that was not a perfect square or rectangle or some other geometrical shape, and I think there is something rather admirable about letting a lemon bulge out of its stamp, top and bottom.

But then I have admired the design of the Post Office stamps for a long time, and I am amazed that people take them so much for granted. Some of the pictorial sets, especially scientific ones, tend to be a bit muddled, but when the Post Office goes mad and does something just because it looks nice, the results are generally terrific.

For instance, there was a book of 10 greeting stamps a few years back which featured 10 different cartoons. My favourite was a Barsotti drawing of a dog sitting at a bar, drink clasped in its paws, thinking furiously to itself: "Fetch This, Fetch That... Let The Cat Do It". Before that there was a brilliant set of 10 greeting stamps, each devoted to a different famous smile. There was the Mona Lisa, a laughing policeman, a man in the moon, a teddy bear, Dennis the Menace, the Cheshire Cat, Stan Laurel etc. And each design was just right – they only showed you the lower half of Stan Laurel's and the Mona Lisa's face, for instance, thus focusing heavily on the smile.

All those booklets also had little perforated stickers, which you could tear off and stick on to your envelope, bearing messages such as "With Love", "Keep Smiling" and "Best Wishes". The cartoon booklet, no doubt because Mel Calman had helped to compile it, had its share of more worrying messages on offer, such as "It Takes Two to Make a Neurotic", "Being a Failure Isn't as Easy as it Looks" and "It's Only You That's Incompatible". But the inventive minds at the Post Office must have got frustrated just changing the pictures on stamps, because with this new fruit'n'veg set there is something I have never seen before, and which might, if I am not being too fanciful, be against the law.

What the Post Office has done is to provide another sheet of little stickers bearing pictures of such things as moustaches, hats, specs, bow-ties, etc, which you can peel off and affix to the stamp itself, thus changing the bare fruit or veg into a face. In their illustrated example, they have put a beret and eyes, a moustache and spotty bow-tie, on to the lemon, making it look a bit cartoon French. Très humoristique, M. le Bureau de Postes! But once you do this, you will tempt people to start adding moustaches and sunglasses to the queen's face, and from there to treason will be a very short step.

What it will certainly do is confuse the foreigner. The foreigner must be very confused already. We are, I believe, the only place in the world that omits its name from its stamps, preferring instead a silhouette of the queen as she looked 50 years ago. There must be people round the world who never quite understood why their mail could bear an apparently stateless stamp depicting half the Mona Lisa, or a Larry cartoon showing a tramp writing a letter starting with the words, "Dear Lottery Prize Winner...".

And now they will start getting pictures of fruit and veg with faces on them, making them into Tommy the Tomato or Adolphe the Aubergine.

And they will think we are mad.

And why not? People are always complaining that eccentricity is going out of British life. It's nice to think that it was alive and well in the Post Office all that time.