Charlie Fish: Mouse, Mink and I have had designs on this task for a while. We figured that there was no fun in getting post that you had written yourself, because you already knew what it was going to say. So we planned to write Honest Mail to each other instead.

We made a couple of fairly half-hearted attempts to start with. We were together in a pub (kicking off the War of Escalating Dares) and we ripped up a menu because it was the only piece of paper we had lying around. Each of us wrote a secret message on the back, stamped and addressed it to each other (Mink to Mouse, Fish to Mink and Mouse to Fish).

I left mine on a tube train, and Mink left hers on a table in the Riverside Studios café (pictured). I don't know if Mouse remembered to leave his. Anyway, none of them got to their destination (this was weeks ago).



So I decided to give it another try. I wrote 12 postcards (proper ones this time) to Mink, put stamps on them and left them in various places around London on 26 September 2007. Scroll to the bottom and click "+ larger" to see photos of the postcards in situ. (And to read what they said!)

- Postcard #1: In a the collection box of a busker outside Brixton station.
- Postcard #2: On a London Underground train.
- Postcard #3: In the Apollo Victoria theatre (currently showing Wicked).
- Postcard #4: On the shelf of a postbox.
- Postcard #5: In the Willow Walk pub in Victoria.
- Postcard #6: In a bank. (I felt really shifty doing this and taking a picture of it.)
- Postcard #7: In the middle of the road (although it blew onto the pavement outside New Scotland Yard).
- Postcard #8: In the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy in a local book store.
- Postcard #9: With the lettuce at Sainsbury's supermarket. (Get it? Lettuce? Letters? Never mind.)
- Postcard #10: In a rack of leaflets at Westminster Library.
- Postcard #11: In a lift at my work HQ office building. (I was almost rumbled on this one.)
- Postcard #12: In a traditional red telephone box.

---

Mink: I left the country on the 27th Sept and so didn't discover my new correspondence until I returned on 2nd October. There were 6 postcards lying on the doormat - numbers 4, 6, 7, 9, 11 & 12, number 10 arrived the next day and number 5 arrived two days after that. The people who found it had written a little note in the gap where the postmark would later be. It reads

We found this in the Willow walk at Victoria - thought we'd post it on! Honest mail complete... love the girls + ed.

I guess they took a look at the website and found out what the honest mail task was first!

3rd October?! I hear you think loudly, why has this taken over a month to post? Well for that I must take all the blame. As I just mentioned, I'd been out of the country and had planned to do my side of the task there, I'd bought 10 greetings from London postcards of various states of hideousness and had intended to abandon them around the cafes and canals of Amsterdam.

Failure.

I had forgotten to take Mr. Fish's address with me (assuming it was on my phone when it was not), damn and blast it!

I then lost the postcards. Grrr.....

With every passing moment of inaction, the guiltier I felt and therefore the more determined to make something cool of this (i.e. worth the wait) so I planned and plotted and finally came up with this.