Farewell Royal Mail, a glorious institution facing certain death

How I miss that distinctive sound of Advent: the heavy thud of 11 envelopes landing on the doormat! Ever since the decline of handwritten letters, which began in the 1990s with the arrival of the internet, Advent has been the one time of year when we could re-live the daily excitement of the post arriving.

I would rush to the mat, greedily rip open the white envelopes (for once outnumbering brown ones), relish the written words of friends and relations, and chuckle over the boastful photographs of the daughter in her MA gown in the round-robins.

Not this year. That thud has changed to an almost inaudible pitter-pat. So despondent have many of us become about planned Royal Mail strikes that we haven’t bothered to send Christmas cards. What’s the point, when they probably won’t arrive till after Boxing Day, by which time millions of Christmas trees will have been cast out onto recycling heaps?

This month’s postal strike dates read like one of those maths exam questions where you have to work out the next number in the sequence: 9, 11, 14, 15, 23, 24. Couldn’t they have waited till the season of the January tax bills? Royal Mail employees are shooting themselves in the foot with such industrial action, because the more we get used to doing without letters and cards, the more we’ll find other ways of communicating.

I was brought up always to write a proper thank-you letter for any kind of meal or present, and I still like to. But if you do write and post a thank-you letter this month, you have to follow it up with a text or email to say “letter on its way” (I’ve received two of those this week, and have sent another two), just so your host doesn’t think you rude not to have thanked them for 10 days of seeming silence.

It won’t be long till the letter itself becomes completely redundant. The Royal Mail will simply become a parcel delivery service like DPD, but probably less reliable.

What a decline of a great institution, whose end is now surely in sight, and whose history goes back to Henry VIII and his “Master of the Posts”! Until very recently, the Royal Mail was still one of the jewels of Britain. We could bask in the daily (or nightly) miracle of posting a first-class letter in a handsome scarlet postbox at 4 pm and being pretty sure it would arrive on the correct doormat in a remote village at the other end of the kingdom the next morning.

One of the delights of reading Sherlock Holmes is being reminded of a Victorian Britain when a letter would arrive by “the third post of the afternoon”. It was the inspired idea of a Worcestershire English teacher, Rowland Hill, to change from a “receiver pays” to a “sender pays” system; this was adopted, and was used as a model for postal services all over the world. Now, the sender still pays – not the one penny of the Penny Black, but a hideous 95p for a small first-class letter or card which takes a week or more to arrive.

We treasure our local postmen and postwomen, and of course sympathise with them as they face what the Communication Workers Union says is “the casualisation of their jobs, the destruction of their conditions and the impoverishment of their families”. But they are merely hastening the decline of a once-great British institution.

There will be no Royal Mail if we cannot even rely on it for Advent Letters.