Royal Mail can still deliver mail from one extremity of Britain to the other in less than 24 hours

The Royal Mail is in turmoil – haemorrhaging money, shedding thousands of staff and facing soaring complaints. But it can still deliver mail from one extremity of Britain to the other in less than 24 hours. Libby Brooks followed her letter on
The Guardian – United Kingdom; Apr 18, 2002

4.05pm . . . Libby Brooks posts the letter at Land's End

Phil Page, the Land's End postman, has never been bitten by a dog. Given that canine assaults make up the biggest cause of sick leave among Royal Mail employees, this may be regarded as an early good omen for my letter, which at 4.05pm is beginning its 874-mile journey to John O'Groats at the bottom of his collection sack. The postbox at Land's End enjoys a thoroughly unromantic location between a pasty seller, a bustling souvenir shop and a kiosk offering historic farm tours. It is a warm day. The serious walkers are wearing shorts and people are cooling down by tucking into proper Cornish ice cream.

Dangerous dogs notwithstanding, a postman's lot is not a happy one. Consignia, the company that runs the Royal Mail, is losing pounds 1.5m every day, while performance has plummeted – complaints are approaching two million a year, and in the nine months up to the end of last year, some 300 million first-class letters arrived late. And, already suffering the worst industrial relations seen in the UK in recent times, last month Consignia announced up to 15,000 job cuts as part of a three-year rescue package.

The journey from Land's End to John O'Groats in many ways represents what we cherish most about the Royal Mail, and what the company insists we will most miss should the regulator continue to erode its monopoly: delivery across the furthest reaches of our island, within 24 hours, for 26p. So what better way to gain an insight into the workings of the institution than to follow a letter on this longest postal journey, certainly one of the most complicated in the UK? To see, beyond the exigencies of regulation and the mechanics of public sympathy, what it is actually like to work in one of Britain's last and most embattled public services. And to answer the all-important question: if I post my letter first-class today, will it arrive tomorrow?

"I like the feeling of independence when you go out," Page tells me as he empties the next postbox on his round. The strangest item he has ever delivered was a boomerang. He makes 18 more box collections before returning to Penzance. There he transfers the mail to another van which takes it on the 30-mile drive to Truro mail centre, where it arrives at 6.12pm.

The blaring pop radio can barely compete with the deafening thrum of machinery. Though voices are raised, tempers seem if anything diminished, levelled by the repetitive activity and strict timetabling. A fractious bleep sends workers scurrying to the area of the machine that is demanding their attention.

The CFC (colour facer canceller) which streams first and second class, and the IMP (integrated mail processor) which reads addresses, are running simultaneously. If a letter can't be read mechanically, the IMP will transfer a digital image to the MAA (manual attribute allocation) suite where the correct details of the address will be keyed in by hand. The Royal Mail loves acronyms. Senior workers are issued with a handbook of TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), though they quickly go out of date.

The Penzance bags are emptied into the bottom of the IMP one at a time, and GBP4 envelopes and packages removed for separate sorting. My letter must be among the remaining jumble of postcards, bills, sincerest thanks and best wishes that proceed up the conveyor belt into a massive rotating drum. After another filter, the letters drop through into the first section of the machine. A series of optic checks assess the position of each letter – stamp in the wrong corner, upside down, on its side – flipping and turning the mail until it is machine-readable. One by one, the letters chug along the thin rubber belts and shiny steel rollers, like carriages in an endless toy train.

The second section of the machine reads the addresses. The read rate for handwritten mail is 45-50%, rising to 80% for printed mail. If the machine can't decipher an address it contacts the MAA suite. Here, workers sit at terminals while the images are flashed up at a rate of 1,568 per hour, keying in postcode, stamp value, or whatever information the machine requires. This is converted into a machine- readable barcode – a process called tagging – and the letters are sent through the machine a second time. It is evident from watching these screens for a few minutes that Britain is a nation of shoddy addressers – lines are askew or stamps have been stuck over words; and some people just pop in a limp question mark instead of finding out the full postcode.

But the 65% of mail readable by machine alone zips straight through the system, matched to a database of every address in the UK as well as some popular foreign cities, such as Paris, and deposited in one of 160 boxes which cater for every destination conceivable.

I find my own letter again at 6.35pm, apologetic in a stack of tagged letters which are waiting to go through the machine a second time. It had gone to the MAA suite because the K and the W of the John O'Groats postcode were written too close together. On its second run though, all goes smoothly, and the envelope lands in slot 137, mail bound for Inverness, ready to be bagged up and driven to Exeter airport.

At 8.20pm, a line of Royal Mail trucks are waiting to peel off to their chosen destinations. Driver Arthur Smith has worked for the service since leaving school, though two years ago he gladly traded his seaside postal round for this less weather-dependent transportation duty. Like all the postal workers I speak to, his concerns are the same – poor communication with management, the threat of job losses and no explanation as to why the service is haemorrhaging money. "It's all a bit worrying," he concludes gloomily.

Just under two hours later, we deposit 15 containers full of mail at Exeter airport. There, a BAC Express is waiting to fly my letter to Bristol, where it will be transferred on to a flight to Edinburgh. It is a small and speedy operation. At 10.40pm, the flight takes off, bang on time. I am told that the mail is seldom held up here, as this airport has the second-best weather record in the UK. Apparently the best weather record is held by an airport in Scotland.

Standing at the Royal Mail depot by Edinburgh airport in a chill wind, I find this hard to believe. It is just after midnight, and a multitude of engines drone across the neon-lit expanse. The buffeting wind spreads the smell of diesel. Every night, 120 tonnes of mail passes through here. With luck, my letter will too.

Airport manager Susan Munro is one of two women out of a staff of 50. She is peeling a kiwi fruit in the manager's cabin, still festive with forgotten Christmas decorations. It is seldom an issue being the only woman, she says. Mainly you are treated as one of the lads.

This is quite a sought-after duty, she explains, because it is a small operation, and not a late finish. "I like having the day to myself. It's great at Christmas because you can get all your shopping done."

Munro met her partner here. A lot of people get married through the Post Office, she adds.

The flight from Bristol lands just after 1am. The bags for the north are decanted and driven round to a smaller freight plane bound for RAF Kinloss, east of Inverness. A portable conveyor belt deposits them in the hold, where four workers secure the blue and grey sacks under thick nets. Now and then a prettily wrapped box appears which they place tenderly to the side. One of the four, who asks not to be named, says that the men are at an all-time low, the worst he has seen in 37 years. "Morale is really low because of the hours you work, the wages you get, the bullying. And we see the money they're wasting. We've waited six months for a pay rise but it's OK to spend X millions on changing the name to Consignia. [Allan Leighton, the company's new chairman, has said that he is poised to axe the much derided name, which cost pounds 2m.]

"Before, the people who were in charge had worked through the system, but now they come through university straight into management. They don't know the job properly and they're paid a lot of money. It causes a lot of resentment. When I started it felt like a job for life but it doesn't any more. You come to work, do the job and go home. The job is finished," he says.

When the plane takes off just after 2am, it is carrying 2.7 tonnes of mail. The hum of the engine is soothing as we plunge through the velvety dark. Jupiter is visible through the left hand window. After about half an hour we land, then it's a 30-mile race west to Inverness mail centre for 3.30am. This is one of the most time pressured sections of the journey – due to the end of the financial year, there is much more mail than usual. Thirty staff are sorting up to 250,000 items per shift, for dispatch to 28 offices, and they are doing the job by hand, as this is one of the last remaining manual sorting offices in the country.

The radio is blaring. The banter is as fast as the flicks of the wrists streaming the mail into GBP4 or package size. A poster informs the men (and they are all men) that the current state of alert is black special – serious threat, increased vigilance. Donnie Smith, the Highland union representative, reiterates that morale has never been so low. "Everyone is just worried about where they stand. There is a breakdown of communication. You see that in the rail industry too."

In an attempt to increase communication, and give workers an appreciation of all aspects of the business, Consignia recently introduced "work-time learning sessions" for half an hour each week. Staff here say that they are useful up to a point, though not particularly relevant to their duties. Their manager, Alistair Beattie, admits: "All they want to know is how it will affect their jobs. The night shift is kept in the dark a lot of the time."

The GBP4 trays trundle across for loading at 4.55am, with, I hope, my letter on board. There is a handsome array of snow shovels by the exit. The packet frames follow by 5.10am, and at 5.15am the portly red vans roll out of the car park. As my letter commences its three-hour journey up the coast road to Wick, driver Scottie counts as a blessing the vast increase in junk mail over the past few years. "Ordinary mail from punters isn't enough to pay our wages any more." Unusually, he is not worried by the erosion of universal service, as the postal regulator, Postcomm, and the EU broaden competition. "Bring on the competition," he challenges gamely, "because there's nobody who can do what we do better, especially not the local, end-of-the-line stuff."

He is bothered by the public perception of the Royal Mail. "I've been in the job 10 years and it's always in the news. 'Royal Mail loses however many items per day.' But with the amount of mail we handle, and when people don't address things properly or package them up badly, when you look into it mail doesn't just vanish.

"I love my job," he says. "People say, 'Do you get bored driving the same route every day for nearly four years?', but there is always something happens that's new or different." Out comes his store of accident stories.

At first light, Scottie swings into a garage forecourt just outside Dornoch, where the postman is waiting to swap over some mail bags. The birds are still roosting, chattering in the milky light. Further along the cliff road, the rising sun's rays spear into the horizon from behind a cloud. The Wick post office, where we pull in at 8am, is freshly painted and spotlessly clean. The ubiquitous pop radio is more muted here. Pressure of space forced the operation to move a couple of years ago from the market square. A listed building, the post and sorting office has been acquired by the JD Wetherspoon chain, much to the distress of local publicans.

Some of the addresses this local office delivers to won't see more than the postman in a day. It also delivers newspapers, though stops short of the Western Isles service of delivering milk. Following an initial sort, the mail is taken to individual frames which cover each postman's patch and allow the letters to be divided by street, estate or individual dwelling. And – miraculously it seems to me – I suddenly recognise my letter from Land's End, nestling in one of the slots.

Duty 17 is John O'Groats. Postman Hamish Donn has worked it since 1968, and his father before him. He says snow has seldom stopped him doing his round. The most unusual thing he has ever delivered was, perhaps predictably, a kitchen sink. He arrives at 9.45am after picking up the outgoing mail from five boxes and four post offices on the way, in a sleek scarlet Peugeot 406. He used to drive a postbus, but the only passengers latterly were trainspotter-ish postbus enthusiasts in high season.

Local residents don't worry much about what time their mail is delivered, says Donn. "They prefer it late because when the newspaper arrives they might stop to read it and lose working time on their crofts." He pauses. "It's the English people who want it earlier."

John O'Groats has seen an influx from the south lately. "Their customs are different from ours," he notes darkly.

Leaving Wick just after 10.30am, Donn drives my letter further north on the final leg of its journey. There are a few early lambs in the fields. Squat houses hunker down against the sharp wind, and clouds slip cleanly across the sky. At Fernhill Cottage, the owners have built the letter box at car-window level, so that he doesn't have to get out of the car. Often people leave the door open for him, or hand him their outgoing mail. By 11.30am we reach Tammie Norrie, a house at the top of the village, where Sheena Mowat has kindly agreed to receive my post. The letter officially arrives. It has taken 21 hours, 30 minutes and, at a rough esimate, been handled by 138 postal workers. Industry experts calculate that the cost of transporting one item from Land's End to John O'Groats is approximately pounds 13. "He's a very good postman," says Mowat. "We don't think he'll ever retire."

Back in the post-Peugeot, Donn is circumspect about the success of the morning's delivery . "I always say, if you do one thing wrong a thousand people hear about it."

6.15pm . . . the mail arrives at Truro

6.35pm . . . Brooks locates her letter in the sorting office, Truro

8.20pm . . . the mail is loaded on to a truck in Truro, for Exeter

10.30pm . . . security search, Exeter airport

2am . . . loading the plane at Edinburgh for the flight to RAF Kinloss

3.30am . . . Inverness sorting office

11am . . . Hamish Donn unloads his Peugeot postcar

11.30am . . . Sheena Mowat receives the letter at her home

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