Quiet Words

Graham started at Royal Mail sometime in the nineties. New recruits came and went but if they lasted the first three weeks, they usually stayed for at least another couple of years. Graham immediately made an impression, if not necessarily a great one.

He was about my age, late twenties to early thirties, and cut a peculiarly slight figure. He was small without being either short or seeming necessarily weak. It wasn't that he was feminine, but neither was he particularly masculine. He seemed like a small, slightly fierce Charles Hawtrey without any of the camp. There was a suggestion of upper class heritage, or at least equivalent delicacy. He had short dark hair and pretty eyes, like a male Sinéad O'Connor, and naturally we all assumed he was probably gay. I imagine that being homosexual in a blue collar profession as was ours must be a pretty tough gig, but probably not so tough as people might imagine.

We were postmen, and of course postwomen, predominantly working class. We liked a pint. Many of us were into football, and not actually that many of us were into performance art or tone poetry. Of those of us who were into football, a few were in it mainly for the joy of kicking someone's head in after the game. Some of us read the Sun - but not everyone - and many of those who read the Sun did so in the knowledge of it being mostly complete bollocks. With one or two exceptions, the shit thick, xenophobic generic Sun-reading working class you may have heard about never really existed except in the imagination of a terrified middle class. Everyone at Royal Mail knew somebody who was gay, and mostly we were past caring because we all had our own shit to worry about; and those few suffering from raging homophobia presented a much bigger, weirder target than the actually homosexual. Gay people were easier to get along with and would even joke about uncomfortable particles of sweetcorn trapped beneath the foreskin, just for the sake of getting a reaction.

No-one knew whether or not Graham was gay, but in any case, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he was quiet, and quiet to the point of being rude. He didn't speak to anyone. He didn't engage in small talk. If you asked him a question, he'd answer with three or four clipped words or he wouldn't answer at all, wouldn't even look at you. Most of us took offence at one point or another, but no-one acted on it because he seemed kind of intense and he did his job, which was all anyone could ask. Maybe he was just pathologically shy.

Years passed, and those clipped three word responses gradually blossomed into sentences, even exchanges which, if not exactly friendly, at least suggested there was a human being in there somewhere, just one who tended to keep his mouth shut unless he had something to say. He did his job, and no-one had any reason to complain, excepting one summer morning so hot that he went out on delivery wearing just shoes and a pair of shorts so brief that locals phoned the office to complain that their postman was walking around in just hotpants, and it was weird. Whatever Graham's thing might be, we guessed that being shy wasn't really part of it.

Another year passed and Graham volunteered to be our union rep on the grounds of no-one else wanting the job. To everyone's surprise - now that he had something to say - he revealed himself as erudite, fiercely intelligent, and riotously outspoken. He went to all of the union meetings and made many enemies, not least being Jim Cunningham, our area manager, the individual charged with shuffling in all of the changes to which the union and particularly Graham as our representative, were opposed.

I am hopeful that I never again receive correspondence from you written in the manner of this letter, Cunningham wrote in response to one of Graham's missives. Graham was amused, apparently enjoying sparring with upper management types, most of whom were unfortunately nothing like so sharp or canny as they believed themselves to be. Graham made copies of his exchanges so that we could all enjoy the spectacle of him going full Paxman on the mealy-mouthed tosspot who was doing his level best to make our working conditions that much less bearable in the name of savings.

If a man gets in the habit of dealing out blows, Graham told our common enemy, sooner or later he ought not be too surprised to receive a blow in return!

We were impressed, and I found in Graham someone with whom I was able to have an actual conversation. He remained a private person, disinclined to give away too much about either himself or his upbringing, but he was clearly educated and had read books. We talked a little bit about Mexico as it turned out that he had spent six months in South America, apparently in an effort to find himself although he didn't seem to regard the expedition as a success. He hadn't found whatever it was that he'd been looking for.

We sort of became friends, in so much as that one can become friends with anyone so private. We became close enough to laugh at each other's jokes. I asked about the apparent change in his personality from when he had first arrived at our sorting office.

'I think it would be fair to say that I was having a nervous breakdown at the time,' he told me with a confessional smile.

His parents hadn't wanted him, he told me, and so he had been raised by nuns. This seemed to explain almost everything.

He took an interest in my first attempts to write, notably an article on indigenous Mexican music proposed for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector magazine.

For a start, a mythological figure who disputes the necessity of human sacrifice has as much place in pre-Colombian Mexico as a sped-up Benny Hill comedy chase sequence in the Bible. The very notion is completely inconsistent with indigenous thought of the time. The rest of the tale provides a good example of the Nahua propensity to explain and justify the present as the conclusion of a predestined past, even if that predestination only occurred in retrospect. The fact of the story of Quetzalcoatl disappearing on a raft appearing in no native record until a long time after the events it explained is clear indication that the tale is of interest more as an example of the Nahua attitude to history than as something worthy of consideration as a literal historical occurrence.

I was not accustomed to writing long articles with academic aspirations, but felt I was doing fairly well with this one. My writing style was significantly influenced by the strident and often sarcastic tone of Andy Martin's writing in SMILE magazine and on the covers of various records by the Apostles.

Somewhere on a Pima reservation two families are enjoying a civilised evening meal to the delicate accompaniment of Traditional Songs and Chants of the Millwall Wrecking Crew. Glasses are refilled and a second course approaches as the earthy and mysterious refrain of you're gonna get your fucking heads kicked in rattles the speakers.

Having effected what I considered to be a reasonable impersonation of Andy Martin's tone, I asked Graham to take a look at my most recent draft of the unpublished article. I asked for his feedback but didn't really want it. What I wanted was for him to confirm that my borrowed wit was indeed as sharp as I imagined it to be, perhaps even to join me in laughter as we considered all those unenlightened people quaking in fear as I set them right on a few of their silly assumptions regarding indigenous Mexican music.

He took what I'd written, and then came back with a response, mainly taking issue with the tone I'd adopted, and my tendency to switch between sarcastic funnies and po-faced self-importance. He quoted Cervantes in illustration of his point, and at the time I had no idea who Cervantes was, or even what Graham was trying to say beyond that he had apparently failed to recognise my genius.

You may have made the mistake of thinking that, as an 'expert', you can cry sanctuary, and be exempted from the ordinary rules of successful communication. Or, you may be thinking that, unless your subject is made to look suitably complicated, even gloomy, you won't win the respect of fellow experts.

I was stung, but above all I was embarrassed because I knew on some level that he was absolutely right. I recognised his criticism as both valid and helpful, but couldn't get past the idea that I'd written something which was essentially ridiculous, even if that hadn't been what Graham was suggesting.

Things became uncomfortable between us, and our tenuous friendship seemed to dissolve, vanishing like mist on a warm summer morning. At some point he left the job, and then I left the job, and that was that. He has no internet presence that I am able to trace, because more than anything I want to be able to tell him that he was right, and to apologise for having taken his criticism so personally, and I would at least like to know that he's still alive and is approximately happy, but some stories simply don't have any tidy ending. Clearly this has been one of them.

Two Wheels

My first bicycle appeared when my family were living on Sweet Knowle Farm in rural Warwickshire. It would have been the early seventies, possibly even late sixties being as all I can recall of the bike was that it had stabilisers which came off once I was old enough to ride unassisted. This bike was followed at some point by a Moulton Midi, possibly made by Raleigh - a gangly frame in metallic blue resting on two peculiarly small wheels. I went everywhere on my Moulton Midi, everywhere mostly being the villages of either Ilmington or Quinton, respectively homes to my best friends Matt and Sean.

Then in either the early eighties or very late seventies, my dad won some money on the premium bonds and treated me to a racing bike - a British Eagle. I was at secondary school by this point and we all had racing bikes, although racing was never particularly high on the agenda. We were kids and we lived in the country and you really needed a bike to get around. Mine was purple, as Barbara Moran noted during a bewildering attempt to take the piss out of me as we all hung out at the sportsfield one evening. She was never a friend, but we had reached the age at which we became enemies for no reason I ever understood.

'I like your purple bike,' she sneered, placing particularly sarcastic emphasis on its colouration. To this day I remain bewildered as to why she should have viewed that detail as some hypothetically vulnerable chink in my armour.

Ooh look at me with my purple bike. I'm so fancy.

The purple bike got me around during school, then college, and eventually art college once I moved to Maidstone in Kent. I had it fixed up a couple of times following brief periods of neglect, up until moving to Chatham in 1987 at which juncture the guy in the local bike shop pointed out that what I had just brought to him was mostly rust, and was therefore regrettably beyond repair.

A year or so later I joined Royal Mail as a postman and was thus allowed sporadic use of a succession of Post Office bicycles, just three gears but bright red and sturdy with a basket on the front as made by Pashley of Stratford-on-Avon. The great advantage of the Royal Mail bike was that occasional repairs and maintenance came with the job, and by the nineties it was my company car - work six days a week and then handy for doing the shopping at the weekend, particularly with that basket on the front.

I left Royal Mail in 2009 and moved to Coventry. Deprived of my company car, my dad allowed me to have one of his bicycles on semi-permanent loan. He had three, and this was one he'd bought for twenty quid in the pub then done up. I rode it around that corner of Warwickshire for the next year and a half in the name of staying vaguely fit, clocking up just over three-thousand miles in total - which I knew because my dad had fitted the bike with an odometer.

In 2011 I moved to San Antonio, Texas, and naturally one of the first things I had to do was to get myself a bike. I went to Walmart because it was cheap, and happily the bike I picked up for a couple of hundred dollars turned out to be made by Schwinn, a manufacturer with a fairly decent reputation.

The first six months of riding around in this new land were a little weird, characterised by tires punctured with astonishing frequency - a couple of times a week on occasion. Everything in Texas is covered in thorns, I told myself - that has to be the reason. Up until that point I'd suffered punctured tires on average maybe once every other year and had consequently never developed any real aptitude for puncture repair. Usually I would re-puncture the inner tube several times whilst trying to force the tire back onto the wheel; so was in the habit of taking the bike along to the shop and having them do it for a couple of quid.

I went to Bike World in Alamo Heights, this being my nearest bike shop. Yes they undertook repairs, a bearded nineteen-year old told me as though grudging the time my enquiry had taken away from him alphabeticising his Neutral Milk Hotel vinyls. He glanced at my bike and informed me that my inner tubes were fitted with Schrader valves, an obsolete type. His colleagues would be able to effect repairs but it would be a pain in the arse because I had walked into a store selling top of the range stereo equipment asking for something upon which to play my Edison cylinders of Arthur Sullivan speeches. Bicycle inner tubes traditionally come fitted with either Schrader or Presta valves, except no-one who is serious about cycling has any truck with Schrader valves.

Of course, I've subsequently found this to be complete bollocks. Up until that point, valves were valves so far as I knew so it had never been an issue. Presta valves seem to have been designed for the benefit of lycra-clad racing types who take themselves far too seriously, who just really need an alternative to something which already works perfectly well; and Wikipedia describes the Schrader valve as a type of pneumatic tire valve used on virtually every motor vehicle in the world today.

Nevertheless I handed over the bike, then returned when the work had been done. I also needed a water bottle so took one from the rack next to the till and paid up. Once out of the shop I realised the repairs hadn't actually been that expensive, but the plastic water bottle had cost me twenty dollars. This was because it had the logo of a company called Dude Girl printed on it. Dude Girl make clothing for the benefit of female lycra-clad racing types who take themselves far too seriously, who just really need to wear something rooted in the old west cowgirl spirit and repurposed with the modern sensibilities of today's active women, and who need to make a statement with the vessel from which they drink their water. This is what happens when you shop too quickly, and when you make assumptions about how a water bottle will probably cost a few quid at most because it's just a fucking water bottle.

Lesson learned, I decided to look for an alternate bike shop to which I could take my custom in future, and so I found Performance Bike at which the staff seemed friendlier and less self-consciously edgy. Additionally, given the weekly punctures I had resolved to learn how to effect repairs myself without screwing up, deciding that surely it couldn't be that hard. Bizarrely, it wasn't, and I even worked out how to change tires. From this I discovered that the tires with which my beloved Schwinn came fitted had probably been crap because suddenly I was no longer getting flats every few days; and I was further inspired to wonder why I'd never got the hang of such a piss easy task before, considering all the time, money, and agricultural language it might have spared me.

So that was 2011, since which I've clocked up some eighteen thousand miles on the Schwinn. It went back to Performance Bike for repairs a couple of times, but never for flat tires. Everything was fine up until the most recent occasion. Something peculiar had happened to the array of gears on the rear wheel, causing them all to spin around independently of each other.

'You really need to take this to a repair shop,' the guy told me.

'I thought this was a repair shop,' I said, peering cautiously past him to his two colleagues who both looked one fuck of a lot like they were engaged in repair work on other bikes.

'Well see, it's not just the cassette. You're going to need a new chain otherwise it ain't gonna be worth repairing anyhow.'

'I need a cassette?'

He picked up a little spindle of cogs of varying sizes to indicate, this being the thing which had gone wonky on my own bike. 'Now if you buy yourself a chain-breaker, then you can get in there - take off that chain, and - let me just see.' He strolled across to a store display, bike chains vacuum sealed onto card. He began reading the sizes.

'Couldn't I just pay you and have you do it?'

'It's gon' be like a month before we can even look at it and tell you just what needs doing.'

'I'm not bothered. I just want it fixed.'

So, having agreed to a wait of at least six weeks without a bike, I at last managed to force the man to take my business.

Six weeks dragged past. I was in the habit of cycling fifteen miles every morning, and being unable to do so was weird and unsettling. I needed regular exercise but didn't want to have to think about it, which is why I like a routine. Recalling that my dad owns a number of bikes, I went to the pawn shop on the corner and bought a mountain bike for fifty dollars. It was a Genesis GS29, a type apparently made for sale in Walmart. Online reviews range from cheap and cheerful, to good for the price, to just don't bother. On the other hand, it seemed okay to me from what I could tell, and it's not like I could afford anything too fancy, particularly not for something which was essentially a back up to be ridden when the other is in the shop for repairs.

The first problem I encountered was that the seat was too low, so I raised it up, then discovered that the handlebars were at a fixed height and therefore could not be raised up in relation to the seat. I made do, and eventually got around this when I found cheap handlebars for a kids bike, just a tube of steel bent into a w-shape. I mounted these where the old handle bars had been, bringing the handgrips up to exactly the right height, although this meant I also had to replace the cable for the front brake with a longer one. Also, because the gear-change thing and brakes could only fit so far onto the handlebars before the curve of the w-shape got in the way, this left the rubber hand grips with only an inch or so of steel tubing inside, leaving a weird floppy overhang. I got around this by replacing them with solid handgrips which clamp on, additionally extending the length of the handlebars. Finally I added a rear-view wing mirror ordered from a scooter supplies store in England, having been unable to find one I liked anywhere local.

I rode the mountain bike for the next six weeks, fifteen or more miles a day, five days a week. It was fine, and even felt kind of sexy, although I noticed some vague problem with the wheels, albeit a problem so vague as to make it difficult to properly identify. It felt as though there was some resistance to the smooth turn of an axle, as though a brake block might be rubbing as I rode along, an impression fostered by a constant high-pitched whine when the bike was in motion. Nevertheless, no brake blocks were rubbing against the rim of the wheel, and both wheels spun fine and freely from what I could see. My father suggested the possibility of wheel nuts being too tight, but it didn't seem to be that either. The most definitive statement I could make was that the mountain bike was somehow not so easy to ride as the Schwinn.

Eventually the Schwinn came back with a new chain and gears so I resumed using it for my daily fifteen miles, now increased to twenty. Reluctant to neglect the mountain bike, I kept it in the garage and made a mental note to take it into Performance Bike for a tune-up at some point before the next occasion of my needing the Schwinn repaired. They would no doubt be able to pinpoint the problem and tell me what was up.

'It's probably those wheels,' the unfamiliar teenager told me, pointing to where the spokes met the axle.

'What's wrong with them?'

'Where did you get it?'

'I bought it from the pawn shop down on the corner. It was about fifty dollars.'

'Yeah, you see it's a department store bike.'

'So I need new wheels then?'

'Well I don't know, but it's about forty dollars a wheel, and then there's the work. You might be better off just saving up for a superior bike.'

'Is it really that bad?'

An older guy came over to see what the problem was, and so once again I described the sensation of riding along with a brake block in contact with the wheel, then adding 'although in all other respects it's a great bike.'

'It's a department store bike. How much did you pay?'

'Fifty dollars, but that was from a pawn shop.'

He got on the bike, rode it around the store in a little circle. 'I can't see anything wrong with it.'

'Well can't you take it in and have a look?'

'You'd be better off saving your money and getting another bike.'

So there was nothing wrong with my mountain bike, but I probably shouldn't have bought it in the first place and needed to think about replacing it. Once again I was the last man on earth metaphorically clinging to his beloved Schrader valves. Here I was trying to give these unhelpful fuckers my business whilst they looked at me as though I'd found a rusty tricycle on some waste ground, and flung it at them giggling fix this, yeah? I had bought the cycling equivalent of an album by Insane Clown Posse into their store, and not even one of the good albums by Insane Clown Posse.

Unable to think of anything else to add, I recalled that I had intended to buy a set of extra tires for the mountain bike. The teenager showed me a pair for twenty-seven dollars per tire.

'You know what,' I said. 'I think I'll leave it.'

He glanced at my tires. 'Those are wearing down, you know. You'll be getting punctures soon.' He said this as though the thought might not have occurred to me, like I might just be trying to buy new tires due to a pathological need to just buy something. Maybe I was buying tires so that the guys in the store would like me.

'All the same...'

I made my exit of the shop with no plans to return ever again.

I will find another repair place, and order my spares online.

I've ridden bikes all of my life, and ridden them great distances, and ridden them so as to get from one place to another. I've never regarded cycling as a hobby, an activity by which to fill some existing void as characterised by money I don't have spent on shit I don't need - luminous body stockings, Dude Girl water bottles, inner tubes fitted with a more prestigious pedigree of valve, or any of those ridiculous designer bikes I see ridden on the Tobin Trail by lycra-clad racing types who take themselves far too seriously - two and half wheels, seating effected by a butt plug mounted at the end of a horizontal armature and you pedal with your fucking elbows, you middle-class wanker. As an industry, cycling now seems dominated by the needs of those with too much money who may as well just be doing a jigsaw puzzle, and it is unfair to persons such as myself; but apparently this means I'm not serious about my cycling.

The day after my last ever visit to Performance Bike I take my fifty dollar pawn shop jalopy out on the Tobin Trail and it is, as ever, a pleasure to ride, regardless of the issue described above, whatever it is. Maybe, I think to myself, that's just a thing with mountain bikes given how they aren't really designed for flat surfaces.

Perhaps we will never know.

Buying the House

I never imagined I would buy a house. The timing of my birth led me to anticipate an adult life of smart suits, cheap rented accommodation, and meeting girls in coffee shops with Ricky Nelson on the juke box, something in the approximate tradition of Joe Meek, Billy Liar, Hancock and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The promise of living in a socialist country seemed to be that I need not worry about having somewhere to live.

For American readers who don't actually know what socialism is, or who think they know what socialism is but don't - like my idiot neighbour with his lawn sign proposing we choose freedom not socialism - for those people, here's the short version.

If you're reading this, you almost certainly live in a civilised society by some definition, and a civilised society with an infrastructure provided for the benefit of everyone. Your willingness to contribute to the infrastructure is implicit in your choosing to remain in civilised society. Your contribution will usually take the form of taxes by which roads, healthcare, and public works are financed. If you don't wish to contribute - keeping in mind that you also benefit from this system - then nothing is stopping you pissing off into the wilderness and living in a cave on nuts, berries, and whatever you can catch. Living in a civilised society doesn't mean you get to decide the worth of the infrastructure based on what you're getting out of it, what you've decided you should be getting out of it, or what you think other people are getting out of it but shouldn't. If your main concern is what's in it for me? then you don't belong in civilised society, or at least are yet to achieve adult status therein.

Unfortunately socialism was on the wane by the time I left home. Rents were going up, wages were going up but not at quite the same rate, and the possibility of buying your own council home meant that those who, like myself, had never really seen the appeal of buying a house were increasingly obliged to rent accommodation from private landlords or letting agencies with rates dictated by the almighty market. In 1984 I rented a room in a shared house for ten pounds a week. In 2009 I was renting a tiny single room flat in Camberwell for ₤750 a month. It was the cheapest place I'd been able to find and it cost roughly two thirds of my monthly wage. By the time I came to understand the desirability of buying a house, I knew I would never be able to afford one.

The problem was eventually resolved when I came to get married and moved to Texas. My wife, who was at the time just my girlfriend in another country, lived in a first floor apartment in San Antonio. The apartment was a decent size, but too small for us as a family with myself added to the equation. She began looking at larger places to which we could relocate, preferably somewhere with a garden for the sake of the kid. Then about a month before I was due to fly, she sent me an email with the attached floor plan of a house.

What do you think? she asked.

It looks fine, I told her.

Actually it looked about four times the size of anywhere I'd ever anticipated living, which was nice. I wasn't overly bothered about where we ended up so long as it wasn't too shit and wasn't actually smaller than my Camberwell rabbit hutch had been.

A month or so later we were shown around the place by some relative of the owners with a view to renting. I'd never even considered renting an entire house, but it worked out at about half the monthly cost of what I'd been paying for my south London broom cupboard. The place wasn't perfect. The owners hadn't bothered cleaning it or fixing anything before showing us around. It could have done with a lick of paint and a couple of the air conditioning units had seen better days. The yard was a barren football pitch of sand and dead plant matter. A few of the doors didn't quite close or wouldn't stay closed, and a hole had been punched in the kitchen wall for some reason. Best of all was the knackered metal frame of a large glass-topped table rusting away in the garden, the sort you can buy at Walmart for about twenty dollars, but with no glass in it.

'You could have a circle of glass specially cut for that,' our man suggested optimistically, because that shitty rusting frame of a cheap piece of crap from Walmart was - you know - such a lovely piece.

In spite of everything, I loved the place. It seemed huge to me, and owing to the way San Antonio sprawls across our corner of Texas, it didn't even feel like it was in the city. We said yes, moved in, and got married.

Over the next five years I transformed the yard back into a garden. We made little improvements here and there, rolled the skeletal Walmart table around the side of the house along with the corpse of a propane grill so as to present an impression of having nothing worth burgling. We acquired cats and paid rent.

Eventually, once we noticed how settled we'd become, my wife suggested that we might like to see if we can buy the place from the owner, reasoning that it wouldn't be significantly more expensive than renting, and it would mean we could make our own improvements. This seemed desirable because getting our landlady to fix anything - like what a landlady is supposed to do - was never easy, and it was getting ridiculous.

Her name was Mrs. Species, which is as close to her actual surname as is practical for the purposes of this essay.

Our kitchen sink developed a drip which eventually turned into a steady trickle, and the pipes beneath the sink had seemingly fused solid meaning that repairs were beyond my admittedly limited powers. My wife phoned Mrs. Species, who seemed mainly concerned about the terrible expense of getting a tap fixed, apparently missing the point that this was her job regardless of how much it cost. When a couple of blokes finally came to effect repairs, an undertaking which took all of five minutes, I noticed that the plumbing company was actually owned by Mr. and Mrs. Species with their name on the side of the truck and everything, which really begs the question of why all the whining over expense. Mr. and Mrs. Species weren't the worst of landlords, but they were nevertheless pretty crap, and her phone manner suggested that she seemed to believe we were living in a mansion for which we should be eternally grateful, the sort of dwelling in which one might reasonably expect to encounter Trump or Liberace or Puff Daddy.

The gold-plated taps were fixed, but we knew the air conditioning units weren't going to heal of their own accord, and so my wife made Mrs. Species an offer based on other houses of similar size and repair in our neighbourhood: ninety-thousand dollars.

Mrs. Species said no.

One year later, my wife tried again.

This time it turned out that Mr. and Mrs. Species had indeed been thinking of seeing whether we might be interested in buying the palace from them. They couldn't possibly accept ninety-thousand dollars, but we'd work something out. So the wheels were at last in motion, and they took us to the figure of one-hundred and twenty thousand. We didn't bother replying, it being thirty thousand more than the place was worth; and then came a reminder pointing out that they had always intended to sell the house, and would be selling it soon, and it would be nice if we could buy it seeing as we were already living in it, and maybe we might like to think about getting around to accepting their generous offer before the place was sold to some other lucky couple - no pressure or anything.

My wife paid an independent appraiser to take a look at the house. The independent appraiser valued it at ninety thousand dollars.

Mr. and Mrs. Species couldn't possibly accept ninety-thousand dollars, but we'd work something out. So they paid for a second independent appraiser to come around and take a proper look at the place. By amazing and happy coincidence, this one valued the house at one-hundred and twenty thousand, the very sum which Mr. and Mrs. Species had been hoping for. The first appraiser must have been mistaken or something, but to be out by thirty-thousand dollars - gosh! What a silly goose!

We went along to where Mrs. Species worked as some sort of guidance counselor. Mr. Species turned up, and we all spent a couple of hours signing forms. We had the usual conversation about my being from England, and how they once went to London.

A month later we signed another load of forms, failed to get the thousand dollar deposit returned as our rental period ended, and  became owners of the house. I looked up Mr. Species on the internet and learned that he was a high court judge of some description and considerable reputation, recently retired to sit on the board of some massive company. He's buddies with the governor of Texas and all sorts of important people.

One way of looking at it is that we were seriously ripped off, and that the massive coincidence of the sum produced by that second appraiser doesn't say much for the legal system here in America, nor the worth of your average high court judge. My wife reasoned that whilst ninety-thousand dollars might have been a fair price, we might reasonably have expected to pay another ten on top of that, and we've saved the expense of having to move, and we're also paying for never have to deal with Mr. and Mrs. Species ever again; so that's the way we've chosen to look at it for the sake of a quiet life.

Country Club

It will be the kid's thirteenth birthday on Monday, by which point he will be away for a week at some sort of subaquatic summer camp, so he's celebrating now, it being the weekend. We've picked up his friend Tommy, and the two of them will spend the day doing kid stuff, eating pizza, and frequently addressing each other as either dude or bro'. The kid stuff is mostly beyond me, it bearing no resemblance to anything I would have done at that age. It involves iPads, memes, and YouTube celebrities - which are people who post amateur videos of themselves talking about Pokémon cards online. I don't really understand this generation, but it's probably no different to my parents' generation failing to understand mine.

Andrea expressed some concern about the present which Tommy gave our boy for his birthday, hoping it didn't seem too weird or lacking in thought. The present is a stick, one so large you might justifiably refer to it as a staff. Tommy found it on the land at the back of his house, stripped away all the bark, then sanded and treated it with oil; and it will no doubt come in handy should Junior ever encounter a surly giant whilst crossing a mediaeval brook.

We said not to worry. At Christmas the boy asked for a fly swatter and a broom. He asked for a broom presumably because I'd stopped him taking our broom into his room with him on the grounds of it being a broom rather than a toy. I wouldn't have minded had he been using it to sweep some of the crap from his floor, but it was serving as an armature by which to idly hit and swipe at remote objects whilst playing games on his iPad, or possibly just watching complete strangers discuss Pokémon cards. This hitting or rhythmically tapping at things seems to be one of his tics. I put my foot down with the broom when he somehow managed to smash the frosted glass shade of the ceiling light in his room.

'How did it happen?' I asked with near infinite patience.

'I have no clue,' he dutifully reported with typical excess of gravity, apparently having missed the point of that whole story about George Washington and the cherry tree.

I suppose the positive thing to take from all this is that the virtual world of iPads and games and YouTube has left him in a much less fraught relationship with material possessions than most kids of my own generation. I suppose it's a good thing. I have a suspicion that it actually isn't, but I can't quite put my finger on why.

Anyway, it's five in the afternoon, so the Texas heat has slackened off a little and we're taking them swimming. Tommy has a tiny hand-held waterproof camera the size of an asthma inhaler and he is making a short film.

'We're going to the pool,' he announces to his audience from the rear seat of our car.

'We're going to the Country Club,' Junior corrects him, quite unnecessarily seeing as the pool is located at the Country Club and that's why we're going there.

Byron - the boy's father - is a member of the Country Club, and so we are granted access by association. Country Clubs seem to be a relatively common thing over here, generally places in which Americans at the upper end of the economic scale hang out, swim in the pool, play golf, get drunk at the bar, smoke cigars and talk about money. I suspect you probably have to know the right people in order to be nominated for membership, specifically a better class of person - as I've overheard at least one overfinanced plastic surgery addict put it. Accordingly it's mostly us white folks, and I can't quite shake the feeling that any moment I will be rumbled as a Communist and escorted from the premises.

Bess and I find seats in the shade, and the boys dive into the pool. We've signed some book or other, so we have a right to be here, and a waiter asks if we require drinks. We say no, because it will all go on Byron's tab, which somehow doesn't seem entirely fair. Neither of us wish to appear like freeloaders.

We watch the boys and eavesdrop on the conversation of San Antonio's elite, the people from an area unofficially known as the bubble in reference to how little interaction they have with the rest of reality. They talk about money, trucks, and the prestige of certain schools. The funny thing is that these people really do consider themselves an upper echelon, a better class of person; but being from England I have encountered yer actual upper classes, and this bunch are really just regular assholes with far too much money and values based on never having to ask or to apologise for anything. The other funny thing is that they just love me as soon as they hear the accent, presuming we'll have things in common because I grew up in Downton Abbey, and the bubble is really the same kind of deal but with Mexican gardeners. I've also had people asking me if I make my own fish and chips, as though it's some sort of ancestral tradition like the Māoris with their tattoos. So I tend to keep my mouth closed because it's less exhausting.

The boys take it in turns to dive from the diving board, alternating with some other kids, one of whom embellishes each leap with spectacularly ornate somersaults. Our team sticks to diving, swimming, then out of the pool and onto the board again, over and over; until Tommy breaks the pattern to hand Bess his camera.

'Do you think it's okay?'

She casts a dubious look at the tiny slot in which one inserts the SIM card - or whatever that thing is. The cover is open and the camera won't turn off no matter how often the button is depressed. Also it feels quite hot in the hand.

'They're supposed to be waterproof, aren't they?' I ask.

'Yes.'

'Why is it so hot?'

I imagine a battery shorting, overheating, leading to an explosion which removes the Country Club from the map of San Antonio, but logically I know this can't happen. If the thing is waterproof, then it really should be fine.

'Leave it with me,' Bess suggests, and the diving resumes. 'Andrea will go crazy if this thing is broken.'

'How much was it?'

'I don't know - couple of hundred dollars?'

We sigh, because there's nothing to be done. The boys switch to table football at the side of the pool, and we listen to and identify a succession of hits of the eighties - Madonna, the Eurythmics, Haircut 100, and others. They're all English records too, which strikes me as particularly weird, and I wonder if this generation will grow up hating these artists as much as I hated Herman's Hermits and Freddie & the Dreamers. We briefly discuss what cult religion Madonna is currently subscribed to, because we can't remember.

Another half hour passes and we go to Florio's for pizza, and the boys spend the rest of the evening doing kid stuff, eating the aforementioned pizza, and frequently addressing each other as either dude or bro'.

The camera turns out to be fine, and Tommy uploads a minute long edited clip of himself and Junior swimming to YouTube.

We're going to the Country Club, our boy announces, and my wife shudders at how privileged he sounds. The words slide out of his mouth as though setting some drooling serf right about the correct order in which cutlery is to be laid out on a table - not even superior, just delivering a correction from a position of implicit authority.

I shrug, because that's how he always sounds to me. I guess I've just got used to it, and it's not really his fault.

Mental

In June, 2004, I finally went mad; not mad as in drinking quite a lot, having a curry, then climbing atop a bus shelter with my trousers worn upon my head, nor mad meaning I walked through the village one Sunday wearing a rather unusual hat like one of those tediously middle-class fuckers who used to write in to John Peel's Home Truths radio show; no - my madness took the form of serious clinical depression, according to my doctor. Work at Royal Mail, and by association my own life, had been getting steadily more difficult since at least the mid-nineties, contrary to the truism that a job will become easier as one accrues experience and seniority. Each year, the management made more cuts in the name of savings. Each year, we were asked to do more and to do it quicker until the demands of the job began to border on the impossible.

Then at some point around February 2004, the hearing went in my right ear, replaced at first by a jangling noise, next day becoming something sounding like one of the less tuneful Merzbow albums. I had experienced tinnitus before but only infrequently, usually after going to see a gig and having forgotten to take earplugs with which to deaden the sound; but this was different - just one ear and so loud that it prevented my sleeping for the first couple of nights. Worse still, I'd begun to suffer dizzy spells and had experienced trouble crossing the road, or indeed doing anything which required me to turn my head.

Something was very clearly wrong so I went to see the doctor. She shone lights into my ear and told me it looked fine. She brought in another doctor who told me that I should take care when listening to music with earbuds. The advice seemed useless, not least because it contained no actual diagnosis of my problem. I listened to music a lot whilst at work, and so accordingly took great care regarding volume and how many continuous hours I would spend listening to CDs of enthusiastically violent rap music. Working without music wasn't really an option, because it was the constant soundtrack of drive-by shootings and territorial violence which was keeping me sane. Months passed, and neither the work nor the ear were getting any better. Return visits to Crystal Palace Road Medical Centre brought no new understanding beyond the reality of lengthy NHS waiting lists for specialist treatment.

On Sunday the 4th of April 2004 I wrote in my diary:

I feel approaching normal for the first time in almost a week. I am able to string two thoughts together. I am not completely knackered. The ear infection has waned a little, the blockage and horribly jangling high frequency noise are mostly gone, although the tinnitus remains.

I rose at eleven after an enforced lay-in - I needed it, plus my enthusiasm for consciousness is not all it could be at the moment. I'd had a slightly restless night with dream after dream of work related horror without any actual symbolic content. I stayed up and watched Brassed Off last night, which seemed apt. The part where Stephen Tompkinson hangs himself from the colliery pit head may have been intended as humour, seeing as he was dressed as a clown - albeit very black humour - but it didn't make me laugh.

Work is unbearable - really, really, really unbearable. We are expected to do what is tantamount to ten hours work in an eight hour day, and it absolutely cannot be done. The carrot on the stick is a five rather than six day working week, but it isn't worth it; not when all the me time is spent in recovery; and why should this be exactly? Because Tom Willis - who has never actually done the job - believes the Royal Mail has to change, as he phrases it - another one of those meaningless mantras employed by corporate cock suckers in service of making themselves appear thrusting and businessy.

Why?

Why does it have to change?

It was working before, just about.

Now it's fucked.

Brilliant.

I once at least had the minor satisfaction of doing a pointless job well. Now I can't even say that much, and it's become a Kafkaesque exercise in moving bits of paper that no-one wants to read backwards and forwards between sorting frame and pouching box until someone finds time to deliver it to the house containing the dustbin into which it will inevitably fly unopened.

I cried my fucking eyes out on Monday when I was finished, having got a mere third of the shit delivered. I was crying yesterday too, stood before a sorting frame about twice the size of what I'm used to, just staring at those massive piles of shite knowing I had no chance of getting it done, and even with at least another four hours to go. It's killing me.

I described another minor breakdown similar to the above in greater detail in a letter sent to Allan Leighton, predatory corporate carnivore and then chairman of Royal Mail. The letter, dated Tuesday the 4th of May, attempts to explain at length why the changes to Royal Mail working practice which he had implemented were impractical from the perspective of us poor cunts trying to do the job.

Two weeks ago, after finishing (barely) at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I went to the café as is my custom. I bought a newspaper, ordered a very late breakfast and sat down. First I found that I could not actually read the paper. I could not keep an entire sentence in mind for longer than it took to read. Then my food arrived but I found that I could not eat it. So I just sat there, staring into space, crying - a grown man of thirty-eight sat in a café crying without even knowing why.

Surprisingly he never replied. Maybe he wrote back but it was mislaid in the mail, the hopelessly inefficient mail.

I was beginning to lose it. My snapping point occurred on one particularly improbably heavy day as I opened up my pouching box. A pouching box is either free-standing or attached to an existing post box, a kind of safe in which a Royal Mail driver will deposit additional bags of sorted mail when the mail for a designated delivery route is of such volume as to exceed what the postman or postwoman is able to carry under their own steam. It was, as stated, an improbably heavy day, and so much so that I hadn't finished preparing my mail for delivery until just before noon - a task which would once have been done by eight in the morning at the latest. This left me two hours in which to deliver roughly four hours work, but I just had to get on with it and do what I could, and any mail left undelivered by the time I was due to finish my eight hour day was simply not my problem. I'd done all of those little closes off East Dulwich Grove - Steen Way, Deventer Crescent and the rest - and I was at the pouching box. I took out my key, unlocked the box, and wrestled the grey mailbag onto the ground. I took one corner and tipped everything out, then started picking up the individual bundles of mail, noting the addresses so as to stuff them into the front basket of my bike in the right order - Matham Grove, Tell Grove, the lower numbers of Glengarry Road...

I stared at the addresses unable to work out why none of them made sense. These were the wrong bundles of mail. These were bundles of mail which should have been in the bag dropped off at the pouching box outside the working man's club, half a mile down the road. This mail should be in the other box. My driver had mixed up the bags. There was more mail here than I could carry on my bike, and it would requite two or three trips to set it right, to take this mail down the road and fetch back the bundles I needed right now, but for some reason I couldn't seem to fit all of this information inside my head in one shot, and apparently I was talking to myself and had been doing so for a couple of minutes. The day had been kicking me in the arse since five that morning, and this was just one kick too many.

I couldn't think.

I stuffed the bundles of mail back into the bag, then the bag back into the box and locked up. I cycled back to the sorting office and went in. Something was wrong with me, but I couldn't quite tell what.

The sorting office was empty but for Lee, the manager, and some agency worker. The two of them were talking, and talking slowly, and I badly needed to say something, to explain what had happened but I couldn't interrupt, and I had a feeling that whatever I said would sound mad. I felt as though I was about to explode. All I could hear was this person I had never seen before in my life telling the manager about something which didn't matter, droning on and on and on, never ending, blah blah blah...

Feeling an upsurge of something unpleasant and unavoidable, I went to a different part of the office - a safe distance - and attacked one of the sorting frames, mainly headbutting, some kicks and a few thumps - really putting everything into driving my fucking skull through that stupid sheet of stupid fucking shitting fucking shitting pissing fucking metal. I screamed in pain but couldn't get it anything like as loud as it should be. I screamed so loud that my throat hurt but it wasn't enough. Hopefully I would be sacked, and would no longer have to deal with any of this stupid fucking shitting fucking shitting pissing fucking stupid shit. There was no conceivable future in which this situation was going to sort itself out.

To my astonishment, Lee understood completely. I tried to explain what had set me off, and how I had lost the ability to think straight, to hold more than a few basic thoughts in my head at the same time. I recall words interspersed with manic flourishes of laughter, just like when you see a crazy person in a film, and I was amused - maybe even a little pleased - to realise that it had come naturally and that clichéd mad laughter was really a thing. I may even have shared this observation with my manager. In any case, he seemed to get it and told me to go home and not come back until I'd sorted myself out.

'Your mental health is more important than this fucking job.'

I could tell that he meant it.

So I went home, then took another trip down to the medical centre and had myself signed off for a couple of weeks with stress, or serious clinical depression, as it was described to me. My panic response, the instinct which would have inspired fight or flight under other circumstances, had become jammed on eleven as a result of month after month after month of working under such back-breaking conditions whilst upper management told us that it wasn't enough. This explained the bursting into tears for no obvious reason apparently. This made me feel a little better, an authority figure telling me that my job was definitively shit, as opposed to scowling and asking if I couldn't just put a little more effort into it.

Every so often a missive would come down from on high, from Allan Leighton himself, stressing how we really needed to start pulling our fingers out so as to ensure the future success of Royal Mail as a business. We're all in this together, he would tell us, so let's crack on. I suppose he imagined us all stood around sneering in our respective sorting offices - huh, men in suits, what do they know?

'Hold up, lads,' one of us would cry like the first worker who really gets it in a 1930s Soviet propaganda film. 'This bloke's speaking our language!,' and thus would we crack on.

Working a back-breaking eight hour day and still having trouble paying the rent, or being paid a million pounds a minute to blow shareholders in some board room - we were a team, all cogs in the same machine, apparently.

I went home and spent a couple of weeks as a walk-on part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, making the most of the sick pay which I really felt I had earned; and I knew that I couldn't go back to Royal Mail. Before I'd signed up back in 1988, I'd had an interview with London Underground. Apparently I had done well on the interview, but I wasn't offered a job. It seems that this had been down to the answer I gave to one crucial question.

You're on your own on the platform late at night, just yourself and a gang of fifty rowdy skinheads, obviously pissed, all busily kicking someone's head in. What do you do?

'Well, I would advise them to behave and to conduct themselves in a more orderly fashion,' I squeaked, 'and then I would call for assistance.'

This was the wrong answer I was later told, because it means you're either an idiot or a liar, and London Transport are reluctant to employ people who are likely to get themselves kicked inside out by fifty rowdy skinheads. Now knowing that this was obviously the wrong answer, it seemed like I may as well try again, and so I applied and was interviewed, and was told I would be given a start date at some point soon; but the call never came. I went back to the doctor and was signed off as mad for another month without feeling even remotely guilty, and I continued to wait.

Eventually the word came back. The hold up was due to the fact of my having been to see a doctor about my ear during the previous six months, and that doctor had recommended me to a specialist, bringing about a Kafkaesque situation. We've written to your doctor asking for him to write to the specialist to write back to your doctor with the results of your consultation so he can send them to us, and that was the last I heard from them. I made phone calls back and forth, then eventually gave up and reluctantly shuffled back to the sorting office around September. I had been away for two glorious months and had even begun to remember what it was like to not feel knackered and pissed off all the time. Unfortunately things had changed since I had been away. Lee, our manager, had been pulled on the grounds of his inability to bully workers into delivering square pegs unto round holes. In his place was Audrey.

My doctor had told me I was to insist on light duties, not least because my ear was not significantly better, and I had experienced a resurgence of the problem with my balance.

Audrey was a slender, hawkish black woman with shoulder pads and a harsh, barking tone. I knocked and went into her office to introduce myself. 'I'm afraid you'll need to put me on something light for a week, or so, because the—'

'Let's just get this straight, Mr. Burton.' Her voice rose to  unnecessary volume, sharp stabbing words with the sort of emphasis you employ when setting a five-year old on the right path; and she was smiling, which seemed kind of weird. 'You do not come into my office and tell me what you are going to do or what you are not going to do. Do I make myself clear?'

I tried to remember the last time I had been spoken to in this way, but couldn't because I've never been in either the army or prison.

'If you have a problem then you come and tell me about it, and I make the decision about what you can or cannot do. Do you understand?'

I either nodded or grunted, some token acknowledging that I wasn't resisting arrest, and that there was no need for the taser.

She introduced herself as a sort of postal celebrity - although I hadn't asked - describing how she had come over from Camberwell sorting office, airdropped in on the strength of a solid reputation for getting problem offices working. Such was her popularity that she was known as the people's manager to some, so she claimed. She seemed to be working by the assumption that I could be restored to fully operational status through bullying alone, and seemed strangely crestfallen when I told her I had an appointment for an MRI scan in hope of discerning whatever the hell was wrong with my ear. I had denied her some small pleasure, because it might be something real. She was silent for a moment and then testily informed me that I would need to bring her a letter from my doctor confirming the appointment.

I was assigned to inside duties for a week which meant I saw a lot of Audrey, and heard a lot of her as she patrolled the office loudly explaining her own excellence to whichever subordinate happened to be available. Each time she passed my way she seemed to be in the middle of expanding upon her thoroughly Darwinian views of the sick, the lame, and the useless. I had the impression she didn't like me very much. The next week I went back out on a delivery regardless, because it was better than being stuck inside listening to Audrey with all her theories of success - every morning I like to begin the day with some uplifting Gospel music, and other soundbites which could easily have been quoted from The Silence of the Lambs or American Psycho.

In December I had the MRI scan but nothing was found, and eventually my ear set itself right of its own accord. Thankfully I managed to sign for one of the better walks in the office, and whilst Audrey remained an abrasive and often unpleasant personality, she seemed to thaw a little, at least towards me. I had stopped caring, and had adopted a policy of agreeing to whatever unrealistic demand she made, then just going ahead and doing whatever was practical in the time given. Weirdly, being white, I no longer seemed to be a target. For some reason she really seemed to have it in for young, black males. Had she herself been white, I suspect the issue may not have been quite so readily dismissed when formal complaints were made.

There is a theory presently finding increasing support in psychiatric circles that mental illness is, in a majority of cases, an inevitable by-product of capitalism. In the March 2015 issue of Southwark Mental Health News, Robert Dellar summarised the correlation quite succinctly:

People with diagnoses like depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the exponentially growing varieties of "personality disorder" of which there are currently about five-hundred, are affected by these states in ways which very often lead to withdrawal, isolation, hopelessness, confusion, chaos, inability to look after themselves, to distinguish fantasy from reality, and all too often, suicide. These situations can often be proven to be caused by concrete social factors. Their progression and the possibility of their alleviation, or at least their co-existence with a decent quality of life are influenced without exception by concrete social factors.

I've known some mad buggers in my time, and whilst a few were undoubtedly already playing with a stacked deck, the above seems to pretty much nail it, and certainly rings bells with me. Week after week, month after month, year after year I struggled with a job often so demanding as to mean that the remainder of my free time was mostly spent either asleep or recovering from the day's labour, because rampant capitalism given free-reign will tend to human centipede its workforce into disposable biological profit generators by whatever means it can get away with. In our case this included sending out an employee satisfaction survey every few months in the mistaken belief of our being so stupid as to believe it meant they gave a shit; and I suppose it helped shareholders sleep better at night, in the event of concerns of our well-being ever troubling them, which I find unlikely.

I always took great trouble over those surveys, ticking the boxes - strongly disagree in most cases - then giving reasons with assorted home truths in the space allowed for those who responded other. The surveys posed hypothetical statements such as I am very happy with my job and feel that I am adequately paid, or I am confident that as an employer Royal Mail has my best interests at heart. I don't know a single person who would have ticked strongly agree, agree, or even no opinion to any of that sort of thing, and yet a week or so later, the results always came back the same. The manager would gather us together and tell us that most Royal Mail employees were very happy in their work, but some were just a teensy weensy bit fretful over job security, although they didn't really like to mention it because they felt confident it would all be sorted out in the end.

Somehow we got the impression that the employee satisfaction survey was a waste of time. I regularly concluded mine with hyperbolic intimation of suicidal thoughts, made partially for the sake of indicating strength of feeling; and yet the one time I was called into the office to give account of my supposedly confidential answers was the time when I adopted a more sarcastic tone, ticking strongly agree to anything with which I strongly disagreed, and suggesting I would be happy to have half my wages cut if I could just be sure it guaranteed superior investment security for my superiors.

'You were joking, right?' the manager asked, regarding me with some caution, as though I had properly flipped. I don't think he'd had much experience of sarcasm at such levels of toxicity.

'Yes, I was joking.'

He seemed relieved, and most depressing of all, I could tell he understood. He probably felt the same.

Scab

scab noun \ˈskab\ 1: scabies of domestic animals. 2: a crust of hardened blood and serum over a wound. 3a: a contemptible person. 3b (1): a worker who refuses to join a labour union. (2): a union member who refuses to strike or returns to work before a strike has ended. (3): a worker who accepts employment or replaces a union worker during a strike. (4): one who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms.

It was the first day back from my holiday. I'd been to Texas, and had stories to tell. I had come in to the sorting office half an hour early on the understanding that whoever had been covering my duty would probably have left a ton of work for me. Happily there hadn't been so much mail left behind on the Saturday as I had anticipated, and it didn't take very long to get it all sorted into my frame, so as the sun rose and the clock approached six, I wandered out onto the loading bay for a smoke. The others were wandering in. I'm not really looking for lengthy conversations at that time of day, but I said good morning to a few of them. Some failed to return my greeting, which did not seem in and of itself unusual.

The clock above the entrance always ran a few minutes fast, which management insisted was not part of some deliberate policy to have us all racing around like blue-arsed flies even more than we were already doing. It struck six and I returned to my sorting frame. A couple of years earlier, Jimmy Axton had retired and bequeathed to me the thermos flask from which he'd frequently poured me out a cup of coffee simply because he was a nice guy. It seemed a tradition worth preserving, and so as I decanted my first coffee of the day from Jim's old flask, I would usually also pour one out for Danny who worked the frame behind mine. I liked Danny and it seemed like a nice thing to do.

'Coffee, Dan?'

'No thanks, Lol.' He walked away, and I immediately recognised the ambiguous concern that had been lurking at the back of my thoughts as I'd stood upon the loading bay, ignored by my fellow postmen as they entered the building. I was a scab, and had as such become an untouchable. Milk would now turn sour as it fell beneath my shadow.

I had joined the CWU, or Communication Workers Union, almost immediately after joining Royal Mail as a postman back in 1988, every month paying my four or five quid - or however much it was - on the understanding that whatever fast ones the management tried to pull, there would at least be a body of people making it difficult for them. The management tried to pull quite a lot of fast ones over the next few decades as new business practices were introduced and it was decided that the most important aspect of Royal Mail was not the delivery of letters and parcels so much as the profit which might be made for the shareholders.

Accordingly the CWU rose to the bat most of the time, and would occasionally stage a strike. I think the longest I can recall lasted about three days, during which a terrific backlog of undelivered mail built up to such volume that it took us months to get back on an even footing. More often than not, industrial action - if it came to that - would be conducted as a one day strike every few weeks until things started moving, which they always eventually did by some definition.

The problem was nearly always the same. We, as a company, were not making a profit, or we weren't making the sort of profit which those upstairs hoped we would make, despite this claim usually running contrary to what was being reported in droning financial circles. Royal Mail has to change with the times, we were told over and over, mainly because that's the sort of thing business management people say in order to make themselves appear dynamic, thrusting, and hence profitable. The advent of email means that no-one will send letters any more, they warned us, and yea there shalt be rude internet sites meaning that single gentlemen of certain interests will no longer send for specialist materials in discreet brown envelopes, so think on, because the end is nigh.

Whilst the number of handwritten missives posted by 1950s schoolboys to doting aunts and grandmothers in thanks for the penny whistle or spinning top decreased as predicted, this reduction was counterbalanced by the explosion in parcels as all the single gentlemen of certain interests began to order everything off Amazon, just like everyone else. It wasn't the Royal Mail which got shafted by the rise of the internet, it was high street shops.

Royal Mail was working just fine, had been working just fine for a very long time, and as such did not require change, particularly not at the hands of people whose experience of the situation was limited to a series of surreal flip charts in some antiseptic boardroom. I suppose the real issue was that Royal Mail had been working just fine as a public service, which was viewed by the increasingly right-wing British governments of the nineties as an inherently bad thing, carrying the sort of loser mojo you would associate with scruffy trendy leftie do-gooder dole scrounger layabouts who hate success and want to turn the clock back to when Michael Foot was prime minister and everyone was on strike, even the Queen; and Michael Foot looked like a scarecrow, innit?

Ha ha.

Change meant mechanisation and massive loss of jobs, sometimes described as streamlining because it sounds friendlier and achieves at least a little distance from the truth, namely business being more important than people, and that people are only ever as valuable as the tasks they perform. It may possibly be a little early to invoke Adolf Hitler in the context of this monologue, but the euphemistic capacity of the term streamlining is probably evident when one considers that all the Third Reich were really trying to do was streamline the population of Germany, and eventually the world.

When I joined Royal Mail in Chatham, Kent back in 1988, most of the walking duties comprised two to three hundred delivery points or addresses, with the average length of first post delivery being two and a half hours. Because these routes had mostly been worked out by the fairly obvious method of having a bloke walking around them and seeing how long it all took, that which was expected of the individual postman or postwoman was generally that which they achieved without difficulty. As the supposed need to change with the times and streamline anything that moved was wrought from above, delivery duties were expanded in size so as to require less staff - so the theory ran - meaning that the less efficient humans could be disposed of, either by means of redundancy payout, staring at them long enough until they screwed up and could be legitimately sacked, or just making the job so laboriously unpleasant and so beyond the means of regular organic work units that they gave up and handed in their notice. Hooray.

By the time I was working at the East Dulwich sorting office in 2009, the average walking duty comprised around eight-hundred delivery points, taking an average three and a half continuous hours providing you didn't stop to tie up your shoelace or scratch your arse or whatever. These duties were worked out by a person with a computer programme and a map of the area. This presumably dispensed with the inefficient method of paying a puny human to make a decision which would inevitably be subject to his or her weak human physiology; and if the robot had somehow decided that Postman Patrick could quite easily deliver the mail to five-thousand addresses in just under fifteen minutes, then the problems that inevitably arose would be attributed to Postman Patrick lacking the necessary yes I can attitude of today's thrustingly modern Royal Mail.

Anyway, as is hopefully needless to say, since the very beginning, I'd always done as my union asked, never once breaking a strike. On a few occasions I even bothered showing up to man the picket line, which tended to be a somewhat lonely occupation as those most vocally and grunty about strike action generally stayed home and had a lovely day off with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly. Worse still, striking attracted representatives of the SWP, or Socialist Workers Party, usually the youngest and most overly earnest members of the cult eager to offer support and relieve some of the terrible guilt of having grown up wealthy and middle-class through adopting someone else's misery. It was always astonishing to see how little they realised how much they were hated by those of us who worked our crappy jobs for a living rather than as a lifestyle statement. It was also impressive how often they came back to wave a scarf and chant rah rah rah up the jolly old workers despite being told to piss off.

Our infrequent strikes were, more often than not, implemented in protest against proposed cuts and streamlining. In practical terms, each day taken off as a strike day would mean twice the quota of work to deliver the following day, and as by 2009, our office frequently received a much higher quantity of mail than we could deliver in a single day even without strike action, this meant the system immediately became clogged up for weeks to follow as everyone struggled to catch up with themselves. Then the strike would be declared over, and we would find that this was because the union had come to some arrangement with the management. Generally this meant that the bad thing we had wished to nip in the bud had been postponed, and would be back again next summer under a different name, or worse still when the announcement was made: good news, colleagues, we've fought your side and thrashed out a deal, and here's what has been agreed, followed by a list of promises which actually sounded one hell of a lot like the crap we had all been striking against in the first place.

Strike action, whilst I was at Royal Mail generally served to delay the inevitable ill-considered changes by a few months, left everyone with a gaping hole in their pay packet, and meant that the work itself would be ridiculously demanding once we went back to work and spent weeks struggling to cope with the tidal wave of rubbish spewn forth from direct mailing companies which had continued to churn out sofa advertising whilst we all had a lovely day off with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly. Additionally there was the possibility that Royal Mail wasn't actually that bothered by our striking. All of the work was still delivered, generally without any costly overtime resulting from industrial action being paid out - the denial of which being something else against which we had striked without success - and despite certain pinstriped types weeping about business opportunities lost through our selfish behaviour, it was one less day of wages wasted on one hell of a lot of people so, you know - big savings for them upstairs!

Even more aggravating was that striking was only one available option in terms of industrial action, and it was the one least likely to work because no-one could afford more than one lovely day off with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly in a row. The other option was working to rule, which wasn't so militant as that may sound. Working to rule meant coming in to work at the designated start time, working until one's designated finishing time, and taking the half hour break guaranteed by employment law. Surprisingly, this method was incredibly effective in terms of making a statement because, since the first wave of streamlining, the job had become impractical with each postman or postwoman required to process and deliver more mail than is possible during the available hours. So many of us began to come into work a few minutes early in order to get a head start, and in order to avoid leaving ourselves with a surfeit of mail which would have to be delivered the following day, and which would have to be delivered during ordinary working hours due to restrictions on overtime. To add to this, certain more senior postmen, having been in the job since the days when even management had regarded it as a public service, tended to have the cushier delivery routes, those with less steps, shorter garden paths, fewer blocks of flats, a lower quota of delivery points, or which were geographically nearer to the sorting office. Amongst these senior postmen, at least at East Dulwich, were a number who had spent many years racing around their second delivery in order to get home as quickly as possible. Some had it down to a fine art, and one whom I'll identify as Grumpy Bollocks frequently blew up into the sort of temper tantrum one would expect from a child of five if anything were to threaten his being indoors by eleven. If it was twenty past ten, and you found amongst your own work a missorted letter for this fellow's route, you would find a way to lose it or sneak it back into the system rather than incur the wrath of this terminally grumpy man-child by passing him the letter in the expectation of him doing the job for which he was paid.

Even more aggravating was that Royal Mail management, and particularly the streamlining enthusiasts knew that this was going on, and that whilst Royal Mail staff aren't insured to be at their place of work prior to their official start time or whilst working through their meal breaks in pursuit of the earliest possible finish, anything that gets mail delivered without the necessity for paying out overtime can only be viewed a good thing, so a blind eye is turned, except in cases where a particular postman is noted to be at home by eleven each day. The fact of this being due to his coming in early and racing around at ninety miles an hour is neither here nor there, for all the streamlining evangelist can see is a man who is paid until one in the afternoon finishing two hours before time, and therefore someone who could probably be reasonably expected to take on a few more streets in addition to those to which he presently delivers.

At our office, duties were signed for by individual postal workers on a roughly yearly schedule to keep up with the turnover of staff, and to appease those senior men feeling they might be entitled to whichever marginally cushier number had become available. As the first and second delivery were amalgamated into a single more profitable megadelivery, certain routes were doubled in size thanks largely to those crusading individuals turning up at half past four in the morning and flying around their delivery at half the speed of light, presumably fearing transformation into a pumpkin if they should fail to be at home with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly by noon. You could track the careers of certain postman through a series of walks that had doubled in size due to their cutting corners year after year. Not only was there no sense of guilt experienced by these people who were essentially screwing up the job for the rest of us, but the sense of entitlement was incredible. I once heard Grumpy Bollocks complaining to our manager about an additional bundle of his mail which had emerged from the sorting process after he had tied up in readiness to leave the office. 'It's not on,' he growled. 'I'm supposed to be picking my boy up at half past!'

To get to the point, or at least to this segment of it, the upshot of this was that by about 2003, there were very few duties at East Dulwich which could be done in the allotted time by a postman or postwoman beginning work at six, taking their meal break, and finishing work at their proper finishing time. Working to rule therefore always had a dramatic effect, guaranteeing the necessity of leaving some undated mail unsorted at the end of the day, so that everyone could cope with what they had and complete their delivery. This would mean that the second day would then end with twice the unsorted mail left over as on the first day, and so on until presumably, the crust of the earth would crack beneath the weight of all the undelivered Viking Direct catalogues of south-east London. This practice could, in theory, have been continued indefinitely, and by rights should have done. The important mail got delivered, so no-one ended up hating us, no-one lost a day's wages, no-one had to get up at fucking three to start work, no-one had to run around like a blue-arsed fly for eight hours non-stop, and it terrified upper management more than strike action ever had, because technically we weren't doing anything we shouldn't have been doing; quite the opposite in fact. The only casualty of a work to rule was that no-one got home at eleven in the morning, which is annoyingly why the work to rule would tend to last about three days before a few of them were suddenly back to beavering away an hour and a half before their official start time, chasing the early finish.

'We've made our point,' Grumpy Bollocks would announce, apparently having forgotten he was simply a postman like the rest of us. 'Let's crack on - get back to normal.'

By around 2003, I'd had enough. I had been in the job for fifteen years and it wasn't getting any easier, and following another couple of days of working to rule over something or other, I decided the situation was getting ridiculous, and I was going to stick with it and work the hours I should have been working all along. When I'd first started coming in early some years before, fifteen minutes had been enough to give me that head start I needed to have everything delivered by the end of the day. By 2003, most days required at least an hour, sometimes an hour and a half to stay on top of the tsunami of junk mail and crap choking up our sorting office. So I stopped, as did a few others. We started at six - our correct starting time; we took our meal breaks; and if we were still walking around out there at two o'clock in the afternoon - the official finishing time - we brought the remaining mail back to the office so that it could be delivered the following day.

By this point the climate at East Dulwich sorting office was such that this was considered weird, disruptive behaviour by some of our colleagues. 'Look at the six o'clock boys,' one particular tool laughed as we all turned up one morning. He himself had been there working for free since 4AM, and yet we were the fools, apparently.

The office was divided into two main factions. In fact it had always been divided into two main factions, but I'd managed to ignore this detail for the first ten years, either keeping myself to myself or just doing whatever it took to avoid the playground politics. Roughly speaking, the divide was split between the old guard and the newer recruits, although there was some crossover if the old guard saw some potential in one of the new people. The old guard were mostly older and generally white blokes whose main interests in life were football, cars, and being home by eleven in the morning even on the heaviest days. They all had a surfeit of opinions about everyone else, how others should do their jobs and so on. They made the difficult decisions about who was effectively useless, who needed to work a bit faster because they were holding everyone else back, all the stuff that you would traditionally expect to be the role of the manager. Their support of the union seemed to come from a love of hierarchy and moral high-ground.

Near the top of this hierarchy was Wiggy, a PHG - or Postman Higher Grade - one of those who remained office bound, who dealt with the public, with registered mail, with overtime sheets and so on. Wiggy, a man who seemed to hate the universe which had cursed him with what was presumably a Kojakesque appearance beneath his unconvincing hairpiece, conducted himself as very much the Daddy of the sorting office in the vein of Ray Winstone's character in Scum. He submitted our overtime sheets to the wages department, as well as the paperwork pertaining to household delivery items - the crappy pizza advertising and related leaflets we were also obliged to deliver - so if he didn't like you - and there were quite a lot of people he didn't like - it was a matter of luck whether you received your full wages that week. Wiggy had taken an immediate dislike to me when I first began working at East Dulwich, apparently on the grounds that I had been assigned a duty sat next to one of his enemies; or maybe it was that I was too fancy or something, not one of the gang. Eventually he thawed, I suspect because I spoke to more or less everyone there, and to continue whatever juvenile beef he carried would have made him look like an idiot. I got on more or less with everyone, because life is too short to hold the sort of grudges you're supposed to grow out of when you're ten, and I was there to do a job and to get paid for it, not to make friends.

The last strike of my employment approached during the summer of 2009. The management had already taken more duties out of the office than was practical for an office which was about delivering mail rather than just saving money. We were again faced with the possibility of strike action, which no-one wanted. We were overworked and we'd had enough. Whilst the CWU may have made differences in a great many areas, we saw very little of this at our office. We no longer even had a CWU representative at our office because it was a thankless task, and those who cared the most vocally were apparently bothered that union meetings would impinge too greatly on their being at home with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly by noon. Every so often one of the union people would turn up from Mandela Way, or wherever it was, and spend ten minutes begging us to desist from coming in to work two hours before our time, to cease chasing the early finish, to basically cease helping out in our own exploitation. Grumpy Bollocks, or whoever had called the union in to address some management proposal which would prevent his being at home with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly by noon, would grunt that this was missing the point, adding that no-one could tell him how to do his job. Aside from this, our dealings with the union were limited to some person coming around with a clipboard every few months to ask if anyone was interested in the great rates on car insurance that the CWU had wrangled for us.

Being 2009, I had recently come close to breaking point. The job was eight daily hours of tearing around, heavy manual work which left me exhausted for the rest of the day. I had just escaped from a toxic relationship as the personal combined cash cow and scratching post to a sociopathic upper-class therapy addict with anger issues, and I was now living in a flat the size of a rabbit hutch which ate up two thirds of my wages even before utility bills and council tax. On top of this, the CWU which had in recent years distinguished itself mainly by offering me cheap car insurance, and by agreeing to numerous changes in terms of employment against which they had initially asked us to take strike action, was once again proposing another series of lovely days off with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly.

'I'm not doing it,' I said. 'Not this time.'

I couldn't afford it. I was single and a representative of the demographic with the highest suicide rate in the capital. I was struggling as it was, and unlike Grumpy Bollocks and so many of his colleagues, I was not living either in a multiple-income household or with my parents. Life was becoming effectively impossible in London, and I was planning to move and start anew, and I was simply not going to jeopardise that for the privilege of still paying off rent arrears two years down the line and a strike which wasn't going to make the slightest bit of difference.

Much to my relief, I was not alone. Even Grumpy Bollocks, Wiggy and the others saw that this would be a futile gesture. The CWU was a spent force, and everyone knew it. Bollocks to it, was the general grunting consensus.

The day of the strike came and I turned up for work. There were seven or eight of us, mostly the more economically vulnerable members of staff, less so those commuting from three bedroom houses in north Kent. We sat around for most of the morning, sorting what mail had arrived in readiness for delivery the next day. We knew we were technically scabs, but no-one felt the term really applied. Had our colleagues been committed union members interested only in the greater good, rather than a cultish group of self-centred nest-feathering shitehawks, things may have been different. It didn't feel particularly great to break a strike, but at least I would be able to pay my rent.

It was upsetting when I returned to work that morning and found myself ignored by those who had blustered about having had enough and how this time the union could stick its useless strike up its arse. I can't say it was because I would have done the same in their shoes. Some members of staff habitually broke strikes. There were always one or two, a drop in the ocean which made no difference to the general efficacy of our industrial action so far as I could see. I would continue to talk with them regardless, if it was someone I had any reason to talk to. If someone worked during a strike, I presumed in our case that they would have their reasons. I couldn't see the point in the silent treatment given that I was no longer a ten year old boy, and this was a somewhat McCarthyite sorting office full of postmen all bending over backwards to work for free when it meant being at home with a cup of tea and some super football on the telly by noon. Parallels with the plight of the Welsh mine workers in the early eighties were few and far between, and would have been pretty insulting had anyone dared to draw them.

It was upsetting when I returned to work that morning and found myself ignored, but for the most part it was by people I'd never really liked in the first place, those with whom one would agree just for the sake of keeping the peace.

'Slag,' Wiggy muttered at my back as I walked past, reverting to more honest type. He was the main suspect for whoever had anonymously vandalised my sorting frame, removing photographs of my fiancé and other personal belongings. It seemed like the sort of thing he would have done. One of the postwomen had told me how Wiggy once brought a Christmas card to her, apparently handed in at the front office by one of the people to whom she delivered mail. The card was in an open envelope. The next day, the woman had asked my colleague if she had received the card with the five pound note inside. It was at least a relief that I was no longer obliged to pretend Wiggy was anything other than a sad and vicious little man.

I still regret that my coming in that day alienated Danny and maybe one or two others, but then it was as much their choice as mine whether or not we remained friends. I've stayed in touch with the people with whom I would have stayed in touch regardless, and the rest I don't miss. Ultimately, I don't suppose any of it really mattered given that at the time I was two months away from handing in my notice, and experiencing a generally stratospheric improvement in the quality of my life. It took six months of nagging phone calls to get paid for the final two weeks, which I expect was Wiggy teaching me a lesson; and it was a shame to end twenty-one years of service on such a sour note, but that was just the way it had to be. I pissed off some people who had never been on anyone's side but their own, and it's still hard to really care about that aspect.