Postal deliveries

 are changing schedule. 

We finally received the dreaded notice in our letter box - the one informing us that our mail will now only be delivered on alternate days. We get rather a lot of mail, more than most people I suspect. This is partly because the Senior Cat flatly refuses to get and pay any bills on line and because he also expects other things to come on paper.

At 97 I have no intention of trying to change his way of thinking. Indeed I don't think he should have to change. He is of the generation where things were done on paper. 

The postal service however is not doing the right thing. It has not been doing the right thing for a long time. The excuse has been that fewer people write letters. That surely should have made it possible for them to deliver those letters that do get written on time? Apparently not.

When I was a kitten mail there were eleven mail deliveries a week. The postman came twice Monday to Friday and then once on Saturday. People got mail. If the postman put mail in your letter box then he blew his whistle to alert you.

When we came to the city to stay with our grandparents we would watch for the postman and take it in turns to get the letters from the box and give them to our grandparents. When we moved to the city for a few years it was my brother's job to empty our letter box and take anything in it to our mother. 

Any form of mail to me or one of my siblings was exciting. Our grandmother, on the other side of the city, could post a letter in the afternoon and we would get it the next day. That was the way birthday cards arrived. It must have been the way bills and notices arrived too. As kittens we took no notice of such things. I can remember books arriving for the Senior Cat. They were done up in brown paper and string. I can remember the thin blue "aerogrammes" from Scotland. They were mostly for my paternal grandfather. He corresponded regularly with cousins in Caithness. I can remember postcards from people on holiday in places that sounded so exciting. We kittens had never been outside the state!

Then mail deliveries got cut back to one delivery Monday to Friday. It was not just that though. The mail got a lot slower. It can now take a week or more for a letter to come from one side of the city to the other. Why? 

It can't be the volume of letter mail. The post office keeps telling us that this has declined. Parcel mail was handled separately. Even if it has increased it should not have affected letter mail.

The move to alternate days is supposed to be temporary - until 30 June 2021. It is actually a breach of the Act which covers deliveries. The government agreed to allow it to happen but there are many who believe that this is not going to be temporary. It will almost certainly be permanent. If we have one delivery a week by the time I am 97 - if I should ever reach that age - I think it will be remarkable. 

The government will have its way. Life online is going to allow them to monitor us more closely.