Industry | 2009.12.17
In praise of… Roy Mayall
Modernisation agreements. Market liberalisation. Downstream access. Postal services should be simple: sender posts letter, post office sorts letter, recipient gets letter. Yet the Royal Mail strike in October was over issues so complicated that even union officials struggled to sum them up. Wrangling over contractual small print is part and parcel of industrial relations – but that feels remote from the relations letter-readers have with the man or woman who delivers them. Which helps explain why Roy Mayall\'s diary won so many fans so quickly this autumn. Under a splendid pen name, here was a postman describing life inside the sorting office. In prose as clear as water, he said what posties thought better than the union bosses did. He talked about "Granny Smith" – "the little old lady who lives alone and for whom the mail service is a lifeline" – and how Royal Mail management now told staff, "Granny Smith doesn\'t matter anymore". First published in the London Review of Books , the diary was repeated in newspapers , stuck on post-office noticeboards and quoted again and again as the strike began. Like Jack Night , the pseudonymous police blogger, Roy Mayall\'s diary and blogs have shown readers a public institution as its staff see it. He complains about horrible working conditions and wonders where the mail\'s ethic of public service went. And now he has produced an excellent stocking-sized book called Dear Granny Smith . With any luck, it will be in many households\' Christmas post.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]c/17/im-praise-roy-mayall-post
