When it comes to delivery, Germans and Americans are pretty hard to beat

Today's is a tricky row to hoe. There are, I fear, many among you who, in about 800 words' time, will be hurtling to your own keyboards and dashing off fulminating letters, faxes, and e-mails to the Editor, imploring him to lose not a moment in putting my P45 in the post. You will do this in the name of patriotism. And because you are patriots, you will loyally accept that precious few of your letters, faxes, and e-mails will get to him, and that, should he act on your imploring, my P45 will not reach me for some months, if at all, with the result that I shall continue to churn out my weekly column in complete ignorance – so no change there – until such time as he sends a couple of Wapping heavies round to break my typing-finger.

You will do this because you will be outraged at my rejoicing in the news that Deutsche Post has just been awarded a licence to deliver mail in Britain. At present the contract is to handle only bulk mail of 4,000 items or more, but, as the ecstatic German announcement declared, "While the licence allows Deutsche Post limited entry into the British mail market, we intend to continually expand our presence", an ambition which will come as no surprise to older patriots only too eager to remind the Editor of the time when the object of German expansion was to split more than mere infinitives.

So what? I say. Times change, and since one of those changes is that our postal workers now speak only Consignian, I would far rather they spoke German. For Consignian is a truly remarkable language, in that English may be translated into it by the simplest soul without a second glance: a letter, for example, impeccably addressed to Mrs C. Milton at her full postal code in West London will arrive at Mr A. Coren's full postal code in North London, requiring him only to underline the address in red ink and run down to his pillarbox so that the Consignians, having re-examined it closely, can deliver it to Miss J. Willis's full postal code in South London. This will not happen with Deutsche Post: having neither English nor Consignian, Deutsche Postleute will not rely on a guessworked glance to tell them what they think they're reading; they will stare hard at the address for some time, through their monocle and from every angle, registering exactly what each digit and letter represents, and, having checked the location on their unholstered maps and confirmed the co-ordinates by sat-nav to one of their spotter-planes, deliver it personally, next morning, into the hands of the addressee with the respectful nod and heel-click which has made Deutsche Post a byword for rectitude wherever it has set boot.

Don't you, in your heart of hearts, want some of that? And, while we're at it, some of this, too? Let us assume that, in 400 words' time, you wish to send an urgent fax or e-mail, or even make a simple furious phone-call, but the line declines any of these options on the ground that it has suddenly decided to drop dead, forcing a grudging neighbour yet again to get out of the bath to allow you to phone BT to make an appointment for some day convenient to them in that it gives them time to turn up the day after. Now, what makes me think that – when the man finally arrives, pokes about with his ten thumbs, sucks his teeth, tells you he is just popping down the road to the junction box but is never seen again – you wouldn't have preferred the whole shebang to have been taken over by Nippon Telecommunications Inc, so that you could have been visited, within five minutes of your plea, by a teenage Kyoto PhD who would spend the next five minutes updating your entire system, bow, and slip away to the sound of one hand clapping?

And speaking of quality single-handedness at the point of domestic delivery, do you know what kind of paperboy I'd like? An American paperboy. One of those freckled whistlers whose left hand steers his bike while his right flicks a kilo of rolled newsprint on to the doorstep with all the pinpoint precision of Jonty Rhodes cracking his wrist at deep mid-off, that's what I'd like. Instead of what I have now, someone – a failed gynaecologist, perhaps – whose unique dexterity enables him to shove 15 sections of Sunday broadsheets so gently through my narrow letter-box that, by the time they hit the mat, they have become 107 sections, many of them so caringly shredded that it is the work of little more than an hour to Sellotape them almost into readability. Now, you in your uncompromising patriotism would no doubt see this as yet another example of the thickening wedge of Dubya intrusion, but if I were to be offered a trade-off between a pristine Sunday Times and supporting a poke at Saddam's Fuhrerbunker, it would, I swear, be something to which I would have to devote a long hard think.