This evening I was out putting some more election addresses through doors and staggered home full of complaints, which will be familiar to anyone even slightly active in politics.  I had a bit of an election rant when I got in, although it was wasted on the cat.

I was delivering to Tollgate Hill, probably one of the worst areas in town for door-to-door activities.  As the name implies there are a lot of hills involved. Most of the houses either have steps leading down to a front door or steps leading up to a front door.  Sometimes the front door can be a good couple of metres above or below pavement level.  ((thats six feet for anyone who doesn’t understand proper measurements))  Not only that, but some of the steps are a lot higher than a standard step.  In most cases you can’t get from one house to the next without having go all the way back along the path and stairs.

Beyond that the complaints are the same as for other areas: letterboxes at shin level or even lower and letterboxes with flaps inside and outside and stiff brushes in-between.  Some of them are so tight you wonder how the house ever receives normal mail because nothing less rigid than hardboard can be pushed through without having to insert a hand up to the wrist (all the while hoping that there is not a dog on the other side).  When you pull your hand out the brushes are so stiff you risk losing rings and fingernails, and suffer countless abrasions.  I really should follow a colleague’s lead – he always takes a wooden spoon with him for the more difficult letterboxes.

On top of that you find cars parked on the kerb so that they occupy the entire pavement and you have to take the long way round to the next house.  Some of these cars even have child seats in so you would expect them to appreciate the benefits to society of leaving enough space for a pushchair. Other houses have cars parked on the drive right up to the front door, leading you to suppose the owners can only have got in their house via a window.

Seriously, I am amazed that a lot of these places get any post at all.  We have all come across restrictions at work preventing us from doing potentially dangerous or harmful things and a lot of them are less potentially harmful than bending to post something through a letterbox that is 5 centimetres off the ground on a daily basis.  I know all the safe manual handling procedures and everything but its not easy to keep a straight back and do the necessary two-handed manoeuvres  to get something through a slot that low.

I am genuinely surprised that the Post Office unions have not put pressure on to tell people that unless their letterbox is within certain ergonomically defined parameters they will have to go down to the Post Office and collect their mail.  I’m only slightly less surprised they haven’t lobbied to make it mandatory to have a post box by the pavement, like the Americans have,  if the front door is more than a certain distance away, or up stairs.

By the end of an election campaign, most activists of all parties would probably march on Parliament to support any such moves.  In a week’s time it will slip well down my list of things to be annoyed about, but until then I am concerned about the prospects of back pain for posties.