Old Lad

Christmas is approaching with amazing speed. This year I have decided to stop my annual donation to the Royal Mail and am not doing Christmas Cards. Instead I have made a donation to our local Hospice at Home service. However the appearance of cards in the shops reminds me of the time I spent working on the Christmas Post. This was a temporary job and you had to be 17 to apply for the job – I couldn’t wait to apply -like everybody else in the sixth form. It was a 10 day appointment and the school used to let us have the last few days off if we got the job. I duly turned up at the local sorting office and was introduced to the other posties and (best of all) given an official Royal Mail armband to signify I was an official postman. There were 4 of us taken on at our office and we were allocated a round. Our bags were efficiently packed by the sorting office staff with bundles of mail in the right order and off we went.

It was a good introduction to the world of work and we rapidly learned about workplace banter. One abiding memory I have was how much knowledge a postman would have about the people on his round – who was employed where, how many children were in the house, who had the dogs to avoid and occasionally some salacious gossip! The mail service also acted as an unofficial social care service and the postmen and women kept an eye on elderly people who were living alone. we also got the occasional mince pie – which I now blame for a lifelong addiction to mince pies. I am known to buy them as soon as they appear in the shops. (If you are interested Gregg’s Mince Pies are the best!) Christmas post was my first foray into work and I went on to have some other memorable experiences. I previously have written about driving for the Co-op but another job that had an impression was some time spent in the warehouse of an Engineering company. This was a traditional manual job and involved de-greasing large valves used in water pipes. You got to join the dirty fingernail club. It taught me a lot about the sort of conditions people had to work in year after year – valuable stuff years later when I was a GP.

I read this week that Morrisons the supermarket chain is stopping employing paper boys and girls. I never had a paper round largely because the school I went to was some distance away from home and was a journey involving 3 buses and leaving home at 7.30. Newspaper deliveries ceased some time ago in our part of the world and so another opportunity for young people to learn the discipline required to have a regular job has gone. In fact it has become harder for teenagers to obtain the traditional “Saturday Job” as regulation creep has occurred and small businesses are under financial pressures. Most opportunities in our part of the world are in hospitality and these jobs do give young people the opportunity to learn about customer service and how to interact with people, but they are not easy to get. A particular disappointment to me is how the NHS has virtually stopped young people to have the opportunity to help on hospital wards and experience what a job in health care is really like. Elf and Safety!!

I know we are quite away now from child labour and I am not advocating sending children up chimneys but I think growing up in your teenage years without the opportunity to experience work is a shame. Pity we can’t bring back the Christmas Post!