Bishop Street, 1990

The Royal Mail sorting office on Bishop Street in Coventry is the largest building in which I've ever been employed, three or four floors above a huge loading bay full of eighteen-wheelers, expansive canteen up at the top. The blend of exhaust and inner city fog as one enters through the loading bay at 5.30AM, still cold and dark, has an inexplicable tang of diarrhoea. I can never work that one out given that the recipe is logically mostly gases produced by machines and related industrial processes.

The sorting frames are on the first floor, a single vast space occupying the entire length and breadth of the building, with a ceiling so high as to accommodate turbines. It's hard to keep from thinking of it as a factory what with the scale and the rafters, and then the tall expanse of glass at the end, rows of window panes stretching up into the roof like in a place of worship. If architecture has DNA, then there is a lot of Coventry in Bishop Street - that distinctive blend of automotive assembly line and modern cathedral. I first walked in on Monday the 22nd of May, 1989, and immediately knew I'd made a mistake.

The entire city is divided into eight sections, all side by side on the shop floor, like eight individual sorting offices set up inside the same warehouse. My first walk was South-West 10 encompassing Hearsall Lane in Earlsdon up so far as Sovereign Road, amounting to about eight-hundred addresses. The upper limit in Chatham was around five-hundred. After a month or so I've been moved to the North-West at the other end of the shop floor, and kept here just long enough to make a couple of friends, or at least long enough for a few of the postmen in residence to take the piss out of me.

I haven't had my hair cut in over a year, so it's getting quite long. I usually tie it in a pony tail because it gets in the way and I don't want it cut, and because it's the eighties. This means that, so far as my colleagues are concerned, I'm a hippy because it's as easy a way to identify me as any. Adrian Hollands has accordingly given me the nickname Mellow, an acknowledgment of generic hippy demeanour to ironically offset my actual mood and personality, which is anything but mellow and is usually severely pissed off and angry at the unreasonable quota of work piled upon my shoulders on a daily basis. Once I realised there wasn't much point in being additionally pissed off by the nickname, they seemed to accept me and so I've settled in.

Adrian, known as Ade - obviously - is part of a double act with Ian. They're a couple of years older than I am, so mid-twenties, abrim with confidence and funny, but not to the point of being arseholes.

Dennis and Phil are working on the frames behind mine. Dennis is abrasive and best ignored - probably mid-fifties, red-faced and with huge pupils swimming around behind spectacles cut from the bottom of Coke bottles. He always looks outraged about something or other, even when he smiles, which is presumably difficult given that his mouth is naturally down-turned like that of a glum cartoon toad. Aside from the delivery of mail, his main job seems to be laughing at Phil's jokes. I can't really hold it against him because Phil's jokes are usually very funny.

Phil is fat, blonde, red-faced - an example of a type which will eventually be identified as a Gammon. He's abusive, but his abuse is dispensed more or less regardless of whoever is at the receiving end and is simply an extreme method of letting off steam; and we tend to generate a lot of steam in this job. His jokes, to be fair, aren't really jokes as such, but rather are expletives and insults delivered with such shocking force and conviction that amusement seems the only fitting reaction.

'Hot today innit, Phil?' Dennis suggests in conversational spirit. 'I'm sweating here.'

'It's too hot for a WANK!' Phil reports, and you can actually hear the upper case letters of the last word, bold and underlined for emphasis. 'Don't you bristle your moustache at me, Mr. Bhatt!'

This last instruction has the defensive attitude of chair legs abruptly screeching backwards across the floor of a bar. Had there been a piano player, he would have stopped. Mr. Bhatt is our driver, a large pacific man of Indian heritage with a proud moustache. Each morning he silently cruises the aisles between the sorting frames looking for parcels he might take out on the van. This isn't so much altruism as that he doesn't want us chasing him down the road with our larger parcels later on once he's already got started.

'You are agitated, Mr. McCrystal,' Mr. Bhatt observes. 'I think you are unhappy about something.'

'I'm unhappy because I'm doing the work of two fucking blokes, Mr. Bhatt.'

'But you are normally doing the work of two, Mr. McCrystal,' the driver adds thoughtfully. 'That must mean that today you are doing the work of four men!'

This is an example of Mr. Bhatt's sense of humour. It's mostly in the delivery, and he smiles a little as he silently heads off towards the end of the aisle to speak with Guy, our supervisor.

Guy has a fire engine which he fixes up in his spare time and takes to fairs and the like. I guess we all need something.

Ade can be heard delivering comic threats to Tony. He could quite easily have Tony beaten up, or done over, or something. He doesn't care how ridiculous it sounds.

'How are you going to go about that then?' Tony enquires, dismissive and slightly camp, like a fatter Kenneth Williams - forever disappointed and underwhelmed by everything.

'I have my contacts,' Ade reports, matter of fact.

A moment goes by, just a little too long for the baton of repartee to be passed along.

'Yeah!' Mouse blusters in the usual spray of saliva. 'Contact lenses!'

Mouse is younger than I am but looks about forty, balding, a bit greasy with rodent qualities, hence the nickname. Everyone pauses to look at mouse.

'Good 'un, Mouse,' says Ade with a fake grin. 'Good 'un!'

Ian meanwhile effects staccato bursts of insincere laughter. 'Contact lenses - brilliant!'

Mouse goes back to sorting letters while silently working on his material.

'Small business? Small business???!!!' Phil explodes with what sounds like genuine outrage. 'One fucking bloke and a ladder! Small business??? Cunts!'

He's just got to the Enterprise Allowance mail, of which a great quantity has been sent out this morning. He speaks for all of us. He compares notes with Dennis, both muttering, now providing critical commentary on those who dare to receive mail on Phil's route, and what sort of fucking cunts are sending it to them. One particular diatribe gains volume, concluding with fucking pony-tail cunt from fucking London!

'I heard that!' I swivel around to face him.

'Oh - he heard that!' He's already looking at me, right in the eye and laughing, but cruel laughter which somehow makes it funnier. 'You were fucking supposed to hear it!'

I started with Royal Mail in Chatham then transferred, which in Coventry terms broadly makes me some cunt from London. I knew the move back to the Midlands was a mistake even at the time, but felt I was otherwise out of options. I've therefore put in for another transfer. I will start work at Catford sorting office in south-east London on Monday the 6th of August, 1990.

I've already told Phil.

He said, 'I'll give it about three weeks before you end up selling your arse around Piccadilly Circus.'

Be that as it may, I'm going to miss the horrible cunt.