Clever fonts

A lot of people in packaging, marketing and advertising seem to think that including a spot of handwriting in the stuff they push at us makes us more positive about whatever it is that they are selling. Rather in the way that they seem to think that regional accents make us think of decent, honest country folk, not like all those slick types from London and parts nearby, spouting the Queen's English.

There is also the consideration, well understood by the people who put the 'Sun' together, that the eye seems to like lots of variety and sparkle on the page - and part of that is using lots of different fonts. As can be seen if you go to the bother of counting the number used on any one page.

And then there are the people from the British Heart Foundation who send me lots of mail shots, probably on the grounds that I give them a modest amount of money from time to time and I might be persuaded to give more. A lot of these mail shots are quite irritating in that one feels the idea of giving them money is for them to do something hearty with it, not to send out a lot of stuff through the post. But hopefully they know what they are doing; they are speculating to accumulate, as the decent, honest country folk who used the saloon bar of the Vine of Hambledon, the one north of Portsmouth, used to say back in the late 1970's when making a sizeable bet in the course of three card brag. Which, technically speaking, was illegal - as I believe it still is.

A lot of these mail shots take the form of a raffle, as did today's offering. And idly leafing through it, I assumed that the sheet snapped above had been printed by a computer. That it had been faked up, as is usual.

Closer inspection however, suggests not: there are too many variants of each letter and too many adjacent letters are joined up. It was actually cheaper to find the clerk with the improbably neat handwriting - mine has always been very untidy, even worse now that I do so little of it - than to get the computer to do it.

PS 1: reading the very small print about the raffle, I see that the organisers reserve the right to vary the prize fund, the way that it is distributed and the prizes advertised. Perhaps they are not confident of getting enough punters for the thing to be worthwhile. In any event, they did not get this one, with the stuff that didn't make it to the shredder, making it to the recycling wheelie bin instead.

PS 2: I expect that the Vine is a foodie joint these days, rather than the boozers' joint I knew. But unable to check as they have taken down their website as part of the lock down.