It’s always a strange thing when you stumble across a website, by chance, and wonder why the hell you’ve never seen it before.

A few weeks ago a friend on Twitter mentioned if anyone took part in Postcrossing. Thinking it must be some kind of infamous sexual act, I didn’t reply but instead searched Google for some blackmail-rich information.

That was when I found Postcrossing.com and wondered why i’d never seen or heard of it before, despite it being online for at least 5 years.

The aim of this website is “to allow people to receive postcards from all over the world, for free.” Basically, you ask to “send a postcard” and Postcrosser provides you a random name and address of one of their 116,769 members. You then write your postcard, send it off, and wait for another randomly picked participant to send one to you. Brilliant.

The best part of the website in my opinion however, is the fact that when you are given a random address to send to, a small image of Google maps appears, showing how far your postcard is going to travel. Wether it’s going to Finland or America, it’s still great knowing that this small picture of your hometown that you’ve scrawled on the back of is going to be on another part of the world in a few days time.

Try it. Yes, you will tens of postcard littering your desk from then on, but if you’re lucky enough to receive one from me, it’ll have Hello Kitty shiny stickers on it and everything.

Early this year I wrote a blog entry about the state of Sex Education in British schools, and how for some reason, we had not adopted the Dutch method of teaching it young, which clearly showed results with a low teenage pregnancy rate.

Good news, it was announced today that the British government has finally seen sense and have decided to follow their lead. From now on school pupils from age 5 to 18 will be taught lessons about “personal, social and health matters including sex and relationships”.

Obviously there has been problems with bringing this legislation into power, mainly the fact that the British public will not open their eyes to the fact that things need to change. Despite the fact that evidence is thrust in front of them, they do not agree that the method used by other countries actually works.

The BBC article above states that in a UK-wide poll conducted this year “64% [of those questioned] believed lessons should not start until children are at least 11 years old. Just over a third (36%) said they did not think children should learn about contraception until they were at least 13.”
How is that going to help when the age of young girls having sex is getting lower and lower all the time? Just the other day I was reading an article about a 13 year old girl (who lives in the UK) who has had four sexual partners in less than a year. Surely this is an insight into how the lives of young British girls are changing, and the Sex Education we teach needs to reflect that.

At the time of writing, the UK has the worst teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, with 27 out of 1,000 births being to a 15-19 year old. Figures released earlier this year showed that the number of girls in the UK under the age of sixteen having abortions has raised a whole 10% from just last year.

Hopefully the fact that Britain has actually taken action will change this fact, and this time next year we will be looking at lower rates of teen pregnancy.

“It remains unclear why Gracie put her head into the gap.”