Lazy Sunday and a Tribute to Postmen Everywhere

Forced out of bed from my lazy cuppa tea by the doorbell.  Xmas presents ordered from Amazon Thursday arriving today courtesy of Royal Mail. Very efficient. The Postman is always more important to us at Xmas than any other time of year and has been for generations.

It started me thinking about the way the last government decimated our Rural Communities and Post Offices and wondering whether now, and only now, if they are beginning to recover. At least I hope they are.

In 1999 before the axe fell Royal Mail/Post Office turned in payments to the Treasury of £310million from it's profits. They were vibrant and viable and had been built over the centuries by amazing entrepreneurs with foresight, something the Blair and Brown governments utterly lacked.  

The Royal Mail/Post Office  has the most amazing history that spanned the entire world and made the service the envy of the planet.  After the advent of the Penny Black and the introduction of the business model that allowed those wanting to send letters and parcels to buy stamps to pay the cost; countries everywhere copied our great idea.

The postal and letter service, started in the 1630's, operated differently.  It required those receiving letters and parcels to pay the cost of their delivery on the doorstep. You could really annoy someone you didn't like by sending them unsolicited letters and parcels for which they then had to pay.

But the best bit about their history for me was how the poor paranoid Cromwell employed men to work nights opening mail before it was delivered in the hope of finding those folks plotting against him!  Lovely Man!

Anyway it's had some difficult years struggling to survive and I hope now that Online Shopping, which is growing in leaps and bounds, is going to provide the profitable lifeline it needs to rebuild the business.

We've lost the milkman delivering to our doors, I'd hate to lose the Postman!