Sorry but Postman Pat doesn’t deliver

Postman Pat has a lot to answer for. Despite yet another piece of mail (rail tickets) never reaching me, my heart sinks on hearing Business Secretary Peter Mandelson's cod-corporate rhetoric about part-privatising Royal Mail. But whatever the arguments over modernisation and pension fund gaps, the arresting fact about London's postal service is that it's rubbish.

As a Leftie, I probably shouldn't feel this way. This is one of New Labour's madder privatisations, with Mandelson parading his unshakeable faith in private over public sector at a time when the free market is self-destructing. He won't put £5.9 billion into Royal Mail yet the banks get £500 billion. But it's hard to see how privatisation could make the service much worse.

In my south London neighbourhood, the post can arrive any time between 8am and 1pm. Mail regularly gets lost - not surprising considering, for instance, that there was a mail cart left locked to a lamp-post on my street for several days recently. Presumably it was Royal Mail that eventually removed it - who knows?

Efforts to deliver parcels are sporadic. I've often been sitting inside only to hear the mail plop on to the mat, including a card informing me that I was "out" seconds earlier when they tried to deliver a parcel. There used to be a sorting office nearby to collect it from but that has now been shut. While it stands empty and up for sale, we have to drive more than a mile to an obscure corner of Camberwell to pick up such items.

More seriously, sorting-office fraud is so rife that my bank refuses to send me credit cards through Royal Mail, instead using private contractors. I and my wife have had three cards stolen in the mail in the past few years; on one occasion, a West African fraudster kitted out in Royal Mail overalls turned up on our doorstep at 7.30am attempting to get her personal details so that he could use a store card. I reported it and got back a misspelt email from Royal Mail, then nothing.

I know a lot of this isn't the fault of postal workers themselves, poorly paid and led by mediocre management. Still, we attach an unhealthy level of myth to the post - whether I put it down to the postman who used to bike around my childhood village or to Pat and his cat. If the mail unions want to win public sympathy in this battle, they could start by delivering those letters to our door - on time.