Our postal service needs to

return to its core business - actually delivering the mail. 

Yes, it could also be said that people need to write more letters. This is not going to happen if the mail is not being delivered in a timely fashion at a reasonable price. It is also not going to happen if business insists on using email and text messages. 

Yesterday I had a text message and an email both telling me the same thing. I needed to respond. I tried looking up the relevant website. There was the big headquarters address but not the address I was looking for so I had to send an email. They need to send me a physical object, a piece of paper. They will need to use the postal service.

As a child I remember, while we lived in the city, the mail was delivered eleven times a week. It came twice a day Monday to Friday and once on Saturday mornings. The postmen (to the best of my knowledge there were no women) rode bicycles and blew a whistle if there was anything dropped into the letterbox all suburban houses were required to have on their front fence.

My paternal grandfather also had mail delivered to his place of business in this way. If there were parcels they were delivered by red vans that went around every working day.

People wrote letters to one another, often by hand. Even some business correspondence  was written by hand. It had to be legible! My paternal great-grandmother wrote to all her eleven surviving children on a regular basis unless she actually saw them at least once a week. My mother wrote to each of us children on a regular basis all the time we were away from home - and we were expected to be equally regular correspondents in return. Brother Cat has kept many of her letters. I tried to but came home to discover she had thrown most of them out. 

Brother Cat also worked as a postman one Christmas period. It was considered an excellent short term job for male university students.

I was offered a job as a "postal delivery person" but it came with the proviso that you had to be able "maintain and repair" the delivery vehicle and you had to be physically able to do the job.  It was not a serious offer, just one being made to everyone looking for work.

Now postmen get around in little electric buggies rather like golf-carts. They deliver the mail once on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays one week and Tuesdays and Thursdays on the other week. There are no Saturday deliveries at all. Parcels still get delivered in vans but sometimes have to be collected from a Post Office. The Post Offices are less in number and most do not open on Saturdays.

Mail takes much longer to reach us now. Those alternate day deliveries are part of the problem but, even taking that into account, there seem to be other delays. It can take more than a week for a letter to go from one side of the city to the other even if you pay for "express" post. Why? Sorting is largely done by machine.

It is one of those things which makes me wonder if we really are "better off" under the recent changes...and I do wish people would read and respond to emails the way they used to read and respond to letters.