Not Nostalgia – LRB blog

My new book, Dear Granny Smith, describes the job of a postal worker 30 years ago, and compares this with the job today. Slightly unexpectedly, people keep referring to it as a nostalgic book, which wasn’t its purpose at all….

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/12/03/roy-mayall/not-nostalgia/

Postmen: We bind the nation together

He is probably Britain’s best-known postman and set to achieve greater celebrity. But there is a certain cloak-and-dagger element to our meeting. He agrees to let me come to his home town but all I can tell you is that it is somewhere in the South of England. He is fiftysomething, but won’t be more specific. He has been doing his round for “a number of years”.

Read more here.

Dear Granny Smith

Book cover

Roy Mayall’s book now available to order on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dear-Granny-Smith-Letter-Postman/dp/190602197X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258530300&sr=1-1

This book is a letter to you, me, all of us, from a British postie. A fascinating, eye-opening, heartfelt letter which goes behind the scenes, through the ages, in the sorting room and out on the daily round, to tell the other side of the story.

At a recent staff meeting, a postman asked what the modernisation of the Royal Mail would mean for “Granny Smith” – the little old lady who lives
alone and for whom the mail service is a lifeline.

“Granny Smith isn’t important,” was the reply. “Granny Smith doesn’t matter anymore.”

Well, Dear Granny Smith is an attempt to explain why she does matter. An appeal to all of us to spend an evening by the fire with a cup of cocoa and take a quiet moment to read a letter from the people who are the real Santas, not just at Christmas but all year round…