Here we go again another blog post about Royal Mail.

A organisation who I both utterly adore and utterly hate.

When they are good they are very very good with the click and drop service being utterly excellent for a small business LINKY HERE

The down side is the constantly moving goalposts when it comes to pointy objects aka sharp objects.

Which all stems from…………

Our glorious leaders have decided to tackle knife crime as the media and the twitter masses demanded for “something to be done”

At no point did anyone actually ask for anything useful to be done so the government have done something

And this something has been to mess around with the edges of the mail order regulations for bladed items

The Royal Mail in their infinite wisdom have had a few goes at tackling this ranging from vaguely silly to the advice released last month which was basically nothing to be sent anywhere by anyone which could be even vaguely seen as being vaguely pointy. This would have seen a total ban on all knives, scissors and anything with the word blade in it.

Bit of a bugger if you are relying on the Royal Mail to post stuff.

After some work behind the scenes by some folk pointing out how nuts this was it appears the Royal Mail have rolled back from bonkers. As this would of actually impacted a lot more then just mail order sharpening as many companies large and small send sharp stuff via the Royal Mail including companies like B&Q

In fact I am going to reach out to a few folk who have been working on this and see if they want to make a guest blogpost

The new advice can be found on this LINK HERE

This section won’t really effect me as I don’t really get involved with this kind of knives but it will have an effect on the scottish knife makers group who first alerted me to this.

This section does affect me as I do offer mail order knife sharpening.

I am going to respond to this by adding in an option for Royal Mail tracked 24 with age verification.

Technically you should be using this service if sending me knives to be sharpened. It is easy enough to sign up for even as a non-business user.

This is the section that really effects me and other sharpeners.

In a rare out break of common sense the advice is todo what I and my customers have been doing.

To wrap the scissors up carefully to protect them and anyone who might encounter the scissors.

I’m going to share this blog post around a few places if you are a sharpener and want to steal it then please do or link to the original advice here

And for my final thought on this whole episode