Every time you post a letter or card it is routed to the final address by a little seven digit postcode. Matt Mason has decided that he will visit each and every one of these postcode areas and endeavour to extract an anecdote or fact about that place as he travels from AB to ZE. But it will also be a journey back in time as he looks at the history of the postal service in the UK and discovers more of the strange world of the philatelist and pays a visit to the underground mail train.

On his journey he meets the great and the good, the famous and infamous, visits the smallest church, enjoys a pint in the smallest pub in Britain, goes to No Place and Pity Me, discovers that there is a village called Letter and that bits of William Wallace are interred in four different locations. Each postcode is celebrated with a single fact, like where the dartboard was invented or that there is only one hotel suite in the world with its own postcode. He does draw out much more from the people and places as he passes swiftly through.

Mason seems to delight in finding unusual ways of looking at Britain and mining our rich history for a subject and a story. Whilst the history of the postal service has been written about many times before, I quite liked the way he looks at each two letter coded area and bring alive the story from there. This is reasonable book that is written in a chatty style, amusing at times as well as being fascinating. What you don’t get though is a huge amount of depth to the stories; to get round all 124 postal codes means that he cannot fully absorb the character of the places visited. That isn’t a bad thing, as it is still an enjoyable read, but I thought that his book Walk the Lines was much better. ( )