Time was when the postal service ran on an altogether better infrastructure, back in heady days of stagecoaches and Dick Turpin, the post was taken on horse back to the pub, where the post man would sit with the patrons and make merry, collecting any more letters, until the postal worker doing the next stretch would appear and take them off his hands, speeding to the next post as quick as possible, an ice cold glass of Rhinegold spurring him on like Harry Anson half way to Alexandria.

Now, at some indeterminable point in the history of the revenue creation exercise that was the Royal Mail somebody thought, two seconds, perhaps we should develop our own infrastructure. Instead of pubs, we can have Post Offices, and instead of horses, Trains and perhaps, one day, God and some loopy French inventor called Peugeot willing, we could use our very own automobiles and vans. And so the modern Postal service was born, and, for a while blossomed with this new purpose built infrastructure. Mail was delivered promptly, twice a day, the first delivery always arriving before you were up in the morning, the second coming mid-morning for the more relaxed among us. You could post a letter first class and know that it would go off that night and by the time you woke up Aunt Mildred in Wick would be reading all about your new cardigan.

But then, after this golden age of efficiency, things began to slip, some areas only got one delivery, some first class letters took two days instead of one, all areas stopped getting two deliveries, some deliveries came after breakfast, first class mail frequently took more than a day, post offices started to close down, letters got lost. And we're left with the system in melt down, as it is today. No longer can you trust first class post, no longer is my mail there when I wake up (actually, it is, but I'm a bad example, it isn't there when the folks get up!) in short it's a tragic, sorrowful mess that would make Charles II spin in his grave.

And the problem? Clearly the workers no longer have the motivation of doing things quickly so that pint or seven is theirs. You take the motivation of ale from them and what do they have to work for? The satisfaction of a job well done? The grief they get from people who aren't happy with the service? Clearly the only answer is to ditch this new infrastructure and run all mail through the pub again.