COLUMN: The season of change - in both the countryside and the Royal Mail
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The Postie Notes by Pete Malone
This time of year is one of my favourites for driving to Kinbrace on the early morning run. The sun has just risen and the clear skies are a tapestry of red, gold and blue. It’s not so cold that you have to worry that the cycle of wet, freeze, thaw and freeze turns the road into a natural skating rink.
Tourist traffic has mostly disappeared and the biggest hazards for the postie are the deer hiding in the verges and the low sun that means you have to keep your wits about you as the road twists and turns.
It has been unseasonably mild and wet the last few weeks but this morning it was showing minus three degrees in Strathnaver. The fields were blanketed with a green and white rime lending the parks a ‘soon to be Christmas’ look that promises winter is coming.
At Badenloch, the last few hundred yards of road were dressed in an autumn scattering of red deer stags. Down from the hill to forage and lick salt off the road they don’t present too much of a hazard.
The rumble of the approaching post van is often enough to send them scurrying back on to the hill although there are always one or two of the most imperious who refuse to move. They will stand at the verge and give you a look as if to say “This is our road – we were here first”.
This morning I also passed three roe deer hinds foraging beside a forestry plantation but at the sight of the van they ran off, leaping a deer fence with the grace of Olympic athletes.
On the way to Kinbrace you mostly drive into the sun but having loaded up and turned for home the sun is behind you and the views are fantastic.
Carpets of gorse that are brown and russet, trees that have lost most of their leaves stand starkly black against the blue of the sky and the hills painted green and brown fade to the purple grey in the distance. The changes of the season laid out in glorious technicolour.
There is a lot of change going on at Royal Mail just now: new working patterns to fit a business model that focuses less on letters, the introduction of new technology that hinders as much as helps the postie on his round.
All of this reflects the changes in our communication habits from when news was carried in a letter to that irritating beep on your phone that says a Facebook friend has just posted something trivial that you must see.
More online shopping equals more parcels and the universal availability of electronic devices means fewer people write letters unless of course you count the seemingly hundreds of companies who believe our lives are incomplete without the thermal clothing, garden furniture, and surprisingly inexpensive hearing aids that they want us to buy.
Amidst all of this change it’s easy to lose track of the things that don’t change or at least change in ways we are happy to see. Long nights, warm fires, deer at the roadside, Christmas cards in the post and perhaps a well-earned dram after a hard day’s work. That is if you can call seeing some of nature’s glories hard work – even if you do have to deliver a few parcels and letters as the admission price.
Pete Malone is a postman in Bettyhill.
