Late Postmen

Martin Lunghi

Seemingly, there was a time some years ago when the good people of Coll both wrote and received letters and parcels more than is the case today.

So at least, Johnnie Glaic tells me, having himself been the island postman for a while with only a bicycle to take him the length from Sorisdale to Caolis.

At first, this surprised me greatly - not the bicycle, the number of letters etc - since I cling to the popular and largely erroneous notion that successive generations become more 'advanced' and that, accordingly at least to a historian friend, attitudes towards writing have changed somewhat, in that, what for us may prove a tiresome necessity was, in former times, a source of pride and pleasure.

In other words, writing was a sign of education and education was thought to be 'good' and perhaps even the measure of a person's worth; if nothing else, it (education) was seen as a lever to topple the class system! There are, apparently, not a few recorded instances of people sending letters to themselves for the sheer glory of being seen to have the postman call.

Nowadays , by contrast, - as any gloomy sociologist will tell us - person's possessions are often taken as the measure of their own worth so that most communications now are with the catalogue companies! Oddly enough, it is now possessions that are seen as a lever to topple the class system. (Still seems pretty steady to me).

The thing is, the postal service must once have been a proportionately more wonderous and weighty institution, boldly bureaucratizing where others feared even to hint. Was Coll then, in the heady days of written communication a scene of fervent postal activity with wicker-work postal carts jockeying for position on the single-track postal roads? Did the Postmaster General hold sway in the castle to the background screams of errant postmen with their fingers eternally ensnared in devilishy contrived letter boxes? Was the Church an offshoot of Postal Power, preaching the virtue of the Word despite the certain knowledge that communication between peoples has caused more and bloodier battles than any other aspect of human culture?

Who can say?

But consider the evidence.

My historian friend points to those common undulations held by more timid academics to be 'lazy beds'. In fact, many of these so called beds mark the last remnants of the great post cart races when carts - sometimes twelve abreast - vied for supremacy, their heavy iron wheels leaving those now familar ruts. Indeed, some remarkable recent excavations have unearthed a perfectly preserved example of one such postal charioteer, his hand still chained to the handle of the cart and his face hideously twisted in a regulation postal grimace.

Anyway, my tale must end here for the moment. Suffice it to say that strange undercurrents of Postal Power persist even to this day. In my own small way of course. I have tried to subvert this dark force. Recently, for instance, in the guise of occasional postman, I have infiltrated one of the many postal shrines and, seized by iconoclastic mania, have managed to fold mail bags in perverse and irreverent ways.

I fear now that my days may be numbered.