Would ‘dear old postie’ strike at Christmas?

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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As I write my first batch of Christmas cards, I hover over who to send them to. Last year the early north winds of recession knocked out any corporate festive exchanges.

I rather miss the mass signatures from PR departments inside large, bland cards. Also lost, because of a Goldman Sachs-like terror of public retribution, were the photographs of beautiful, privately educated children enjoying long-haul winter holidays. All that remained were small charity cards bearing the cramped writing of elderly relatives.

According to December's literary "gem", Dear Granny Smith - A Letter From Your Postman by "Roy Mayall", this returns us to the heart of the postal system.

Your bank manager may have put your savings in Dubai, your doctor turned to voicemail, your vicar gone out of business, while your relatives are too busy filling out the Dignitas forms for you, but your loyal old postie still has your interests at heart.

Do you remember how he bicycled up to your honeysuckle cottage, delivered the card from your nephew in Australia, had a cup of tea with you, shook his head over new-fangled communications, checked you were still breathing and left you with a cheery wave?

But since Adam Crozier and Peter Mandelson stuck their capitalist noses through the letterbox, everything has changed.

According to the book, the song in the postie's heart "made up of dawn colours and birdsong" has been extinguished.

There is now something heartless called an "attendance procedure" and routes have taken on a cold logic.

There is no time to talk to Granny Smith any more and why would she want to anyway when you have just tipped a ton of advertising leaflets through her door and told her that she has to wait until the afternoon for any correspondence from her nephew.

Of course, one's sympathy is with the old postie and his singing heart. It is an as yet unsolved problem of modernisation that when you remove human contact, you lessen the sense of responsibility. A business school vision can be as bureaucratic and incompetent as that of the state.

But I fear postie's world, evoked in this Christmas book, is gone and cannot now be revived. Granny Smith's cottage has probably been knocked down to build a new Tesco. If we want to communicate, email is much more efficient.

The post is something that happens while you are away at work. And today's postman is as likely to be mauled by a pit bull as invited in by a little old lady.

The only time the postman is restored in the public affection, as benign as Santa Claus, is at Christmas, and this year he has decided to threaten a strike. Poor old Granny Smith.

[Pat Ostman]

But since Adam Crozier and Peter Mandelson stuck their capitalist noses through the letterbox, everything has changed.

In one!

[Godric]

would i go out on strike at christmas ??

you better believe i would