While nowadays, we tend to think of postcodes as belonging to a location (or vice-versa), the *original* purpose was for routing mail. Therefore, they don’t show where a property *is* but instead tell Royal Mail how to route mail towards that property.

The first group of characters is used at the dispatch end – to indicate which delivery office the letter should be forwarded to.

The second group of characters is then used at the receiving office – essentially to indicate which postman gets to deliver the letter.

So if some Acottish properties get mail from an English sorting office, it gets an English postcode, and vice-versa.

Aberystwyth is a bit extreme though!

But there is no way I would publicly celebrate her death. And UI wish her supporters would return the favour by not publicly celebrating her life.

It does not seem logical to have cross country codes. I believe the same issues affect England and Scotland border areas much to the annoyance of the residents.

Perhaps the HoF could be split for the future: we could have a chart of contemporary “classics” where all the video music and some of the stuff written by people like Long, Hawes and Lord could go and then we could have a traditional classical music chart where the single criterion is that the composer must have been deceased for, say, at least 10 years. That would cut out a lot of the what I would term the “modern music”. However, if such music persisted in the popular psyche, so to speak, then obviously in due course it would become eligible to be voted into the traditional chart and I would be pleased to see it there, whether I liked the piece or not, because it had proved its endurance capability.

That would release many more chart positions for the more deserving, truly “classical” pieces. We might even see a re-entry of Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony” then!

The other thing I wonder about with CFM is who chooses which recording to play. I didn’t hear too much of the chart this year, but the disappointment of the weekend for me was the recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs – beautiful playing from the CBSO but hardly the greatest of sopranos! A few weeks ago Jane Jones played Beethoven 9 – but the longest, most painful recording I’ve ever heard (conducted by Karl Bohm). Was almost as bad as the recording they played in the HoF chart last year (and that was BAD!).

If only CFM could get a presenter who could give intelligent commentary on recordings like Andrew McGregor on R3 (no prizes for guessing who I listen to on Saturday mornings). I know David Mellor sometimes gives interesting insight into his music, but his….. very strange… pauses… in the middle of…. sentences drive me nuts.

Final thought – can all CFM presenters note that the higher of two entries is indeed the higher, not the highest! I’ll get off my soapbox now

I do not expect some video game music to be regarded as somehow “more popular” than Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto or Mozart’s clarinet concerto. The idea is just ludicrous. As you rightly point out, Jonathan, the “Hall of Fame” is not a pop chart. It was supposed to be to be a testing of the nation’s classical music tastes. It’s stopped being that. If Classic FM or groups of others are actively campaigning for hitherto unknown pieces of music to be shot straight to the top of the chart then the “Hall of Fame” loses both its meaning and its importance. We’re at the stage now where we don’t really know which is the most popular pieces of classical music because the numbers have been distorted by the inclusion of this (probably) ephemeral video game music so, like Jonathan, I believe we’ve reached the stage where it’s time to abandon the “Hall of Fame” because it is fast becoming a laughing-stock.

I, too, didn’t listen much to the countdown. I would say that I heard at most about a couple of hours of it whereas in previous years I have had a radio on in every room so that as I worked through the day I wouldn’t miss a single track. It used to be a wonderful experience, having wall-to-wall, superb classical music, many pieces I loved to listen to, some pieces I had half-forgotten, and others that were slowly becoming favourites. I shall not be listening at all next year, it will be a non-event for me. I do think that CFM has lost the plot. And I’m very sad about it.