“It’s better than walking the streets”:
Keeping spirits up in a Royal Mail Delivery Office
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I am a delivery postman in a Somerset village, Woolavington, on the Polden Hills. There are three of us and we work from a wooden shed at the back of a Co-op Post Office and Store. Our main office, 120 strong, is Bridgwater, five miles away, where I perform overtime once a week.
Working for Royal Mail can still be an enjoyable and worthwhile job. Last year in a single daily delivery duty, Woolavington 1, the council estate, 559 ‘calls’, I gingerly moved to safety two frogs f***ing on a doorstep, heard three skylarks singing over different streets, and heard a ‘weep weep!’ cry over my head and looked two hundred feet up to see a raven chasing off a buzzard……..and people, overwhelmingly working-class Somerset, are friendly and fine, except when the clichés come popping out:
‘You’re late today postman!’
‘You can take it back if it’s a bill!’
‘All junk mail I expect, you know where that’s going!’
‘Where’s my lottery cheque?’