“Somebody sent me a teabag once,” commented one audience member.

“That’s nothing,” a student replied proudly, “I successfully posted a potato.”

As Dr David Bramwell revealed, to surprised laughter from the small crowd packing out Bom-Bane’s elaborately decorated basement, artists, pranksters and international athletes have been crafting creative challenges to the postal service for over a century.

From people attempting to circumvent passport control by posting themselves overseas, to the curious Londoner lost in a pea-souper fog who had himself delivered safely home by patient postmen, experimental mail art has taken on many forms.

The evening - which was interrupted by a “pudding break” for hot brownies and ice-cream - also involved a lecture about the UK’s ghost towns.

Some were taken over by the military, while drowned villages crumbled into the sea following coastal erosion, illustrated by a ghostly digital reconstruction of six successive churches on the seabed.

Other drowned villages were flooded to make way for dams, with the eerily fascinating spectacle of their church spires and submerged gravestones emerging from the waters during droughts.

Encompassing stories from local archaeology to the violent history of Sealand, Bramwell’s engaging lectures in these charmed surroundings offer a unique and absorbing evening.

Five stars