Rural Isolation as its ups and downs but a real up is the practice
of the successive posties not only to deliver mail but to pick it up as well. When we had the village post office on our kitchen table, open 9-1 Mondays and Thursdays Alan the long serving postman used to march into the house, plonk our mail beside the washing up and take the post office plus private mail away with him-and the pickup and delivery was regardless of whether the post office was 'open' or not. When the post office deserted the Old Manse for the Village Hall the same service has continued with the post entering and leaving via the boot box outside our back door.

Every day, bar Sundays, for ten and a half years we have had some kind of mail delivered here. Often just junk, mostly useless catalogues (impossible to stop), but something.

Until yesterday. Nothing, And, horrors of horrors, two important missives (vital crossword entries) left uncollected. What could have happened? The BBC Blether Centre was talking about travel disruption-70mph winds and the danger of power lines collapsing, trees blown over, high sided lorries swept off the A1 but, always, come Rain,snow, Hurricane,Earthquake (and there was a small one this morning south of us),the Postie gets through.

But not yesterday

If he does not show up today we will have to consider upgrading our crossword entries to First Class. Rural Isolation indeed

AS WH Auden put it

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?




But if the Postie does not turn up its all a wasted effort. Isn't it?

Labels: Post Office, Posties, Rural Isolation

  ¶ 9:34 AM (4) comments

  No need to sign for this one

One advantage of living in rural areas (this one at least) is the very personal postal service. Not only does the postie deliver the mail as per his (in this case) job description he will also pick up the outgoing letters. Nothing to do with us having been a post office, just part of the service. And as we live next to the only industrial outfit in greater Hutton, we get our mail nice and early in the morning. And, a bonus this, thanks to the enthusiasm of our postal guy I now know more about Newcastle United than I ever did before and much more than I really need to know for most purposes. But at least I can shout 'Come on the Magpies' with some authority. Not that it often seems to work. And I don't really want to worry about Michael Owen on top of trying to sell a large house.

The Posties cover a huge parish berween 7am and 2 pm or so having started off at Ber Wick sorting office. TD15 being English,basically. And I sometimes see them in unexpected places sipping their coffee or munching their dinner. Or up to something else less explicable.

Like this morning there was the little red van parked outside the 'new' cemetery-only been in use this past thirty years. No sipping no munching-some other mission.

Suddenly the thought of a dead letter box popped into my head. In the new cemetry. Of course.Fishwick Special Branch would never have thought of that. And the whole operation would give a new dimension to the expression:

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Labels: Hutton, Low Flying Merse, Posties, Royal Mail

  ¶ 10:14 AM (0) comments