The post strike will be over tomorrow so when I got home from work tonight (6.30am-10.30pm today), I saw Sharon’s post waiting to be sent today all parcelled up in an environmentally friendly jute bag and decided to use it as my photo. Let’s not be too ‘arty-farty’ here – it’s my photo because after a sixteen hour working day there isn’t much left in me to be frank.

Anyway – I thought it’d give me the opportunity to share a true story about a couple of our country’s ex-postal workers. It’s got nothing to do with strikes or fair pay as I hope will become apparent!

An old friend of mine, let’s call her ‘Miss X’ for the sake of her anonymity, used to be a post lady. She’d get up for most of the year well before dawn, do here work then be home at lunchtime to spend the rest of her day pleasing herself – not great pay but she enjoyed the freedom it gave her.

In a chance conversation with a colleague, she mentioned that she needed a painter and decorator but had been unable to find one, at which point the colleague said he’d be interested in doing the job and was qualified because that was his previous occupation. She trusted him because he was the father of an ex school friend of hers. She arranged for him to go round to her house and price up the job so after work one day, she went home in her car and he followed on his post office push-bike.

When he got to her house, it became quickly apparent that he was completely plastered – and I don’t mean the pink stuff you put on walls! He looked round at the job then asked to use her toilet. When he returned from the toilet, he was stark naked and proclaiming in a loud voice that he would give her the time of her life. She was mortified as you might expect and asked him to leave immediately. He refused. She got more and more desperate but he just wouldn’t go.

She had, at the time, a very jealous boyfriend who was due home from work himself and she was petrified of him turning up and getting the wrong end of the stick.

Eventually, the man went up her stairs, opened a door at random, found himself in her bedroom, climbed into bed and went to sleep. Miss X’s panic by this time knew no bounds. The clock was ticking away and she had to get him out before her boyfriend got home so she did the only thing she though she had left to try. She called the Police.

They arrived, to be told by the man when they woke him that he was there as an invited guest, not as an intruder. The Police were persuaded by Miss X that this was not the case and so the man got himself up and dressed and was just about to leave when the boyfriend turned up home. There was a big scene in the front garden of the house, luckily the Police were there to keep order.

In a fit of ‘kindness’ to the man, whose details they’d already ascertained, the told him to go home. He climbed onto his Post Office issue bicycle and went to set off. The policeman said that he’d be arrested if he rode his bike for being ‘drunk in charge of a bicycle’ but the man would not be dissuaded and set off up the road, with the Police and my friend watching with wry smiles on their faces. The road was a dead end and he was going the wrong way. The Police simply waited on the pavement to nab him when he came back down the road.

By this time, the man had got up quite a head of steam – the road was quite steeply sloped. He went flying past the Police before they could stop him and made to turn left at the end but misjudged his turn. He went headlong into the house at the end of the street’s driveway and crashed his Post Office bike into the garage door.

The Police then intervened, picked him up, chucked him into the back of their van, with his bike and took him to the Police station, where he was searched. The Police found an empty Vodka bottle along with a whole load of undelivered post from the previous few weeks.

Needless to say he lost his job. Miss X found herself having to do a ‘recovery job’ with her boyfriend who did, eventually, believe her story.

This is so unbelievable that it may seem like a big work of fiction, but believe me, it’s absolutely true!

Last year, chaos!