The secrets of the ultimate walking job
For most walkers the appeal of walking is in travelling under one’s own steam to discover new sights and sounds, whether filling in the gaps of a lifelong neighbourhood or taking in famous landscapes across the world.
But for the neighbourhood postie the only goal is efficiency, and the only way is repetition. The same streets (‘loops’), the same beat (or ‘duty’), every day, for months or years at a time. Many people who enjoy walking and being outdoors have probably thought they’d love to be a post-person, so what’s it really like?
This summer I found myself with, euphemistically, an unexpected career break, and searching for a part-time job I could fit around artistic pursuits. Still, every cloud has a silver lining. Applying to Royal Mail would have been crazy a year ago but now it seemed like a sensible approach which also ticked off an ‘in-another-life’ pipe dream. It was now time to find out for real.
A note on terminology: although ‘post-person’ doesn’t trip off the tongue as well as postman, this is now the official job title. Royal Mail also encourages the use of the term ‘postie’ as it’s both in common parlance and gender-neutral. Although they’re definitely in the minority, there are a significant number of post-women working at Royal Mail now. There are some challenges for the postie out on delivery that will be slightly more amplified for women, which perhaps explains the continued gender gap. But I wouldn’t be too quick to write a note ‘to the postman’ if I was you!
The interview was relatively stress-free. If you can answer ‘Yes’ to ‘Can you read?’, ‘Can you drive?’ and ‘Can you walk?’ you too can get a post job. Two weeks later, after one day of online training, I was in the depot, delivering, and discovering that the real job was nothing like the training. The old joke people often say is that being a postie is ‘better than walking the streets’, i.e. being unemployed. But it’s not a job for slackers, and just enjoying a flaneur-esque stroll around town will not cut the mustard!
A right royal knees-up
This type of walking is not Slow Ways. It is, in fact, very-bloody-fast ways.
I would say in some ways the best part about going-for-a-walk walking is you can choose to stop or slow down when you want to. The yin to the yang, if you will. But a postie cannot stop or slow down. You must keep going until your load is done. And after that? Well, you’ll do it all again tomorrow.
Day by day that picture of the local area gets filled in further, through repetition. Post is fairly simple, it’s parcels where it gets intricate; the Royal Mail has far more stringent rules on where you can leave parcels than the cheaper delivery companies, and the company relies heavily on its regular posties’ local knowledge to get things done smoothly. Who has an unlocked porch? Who never leaves the house without their car? 44’s never in but the wife’s mother lives at 38 and she’s retired so she’ll take it. Don’t even knock for 22, go straight to 20, but neither of them will talk to 21, there’s bad blood there. And so on. This knowledge helps you shift stuff faster.
In fact the job of a postie is not much like going for a good walk at all. When walking, there’s distance to cover; most walkers probably don’t stop often. In contrast, a postie is stopping every few seconds for doors and gates. There’s a lot of turning on your heel, jumping in and out of the van, driving the van short distances, stopping to close gates and sometimes backtracking. In fact any stretch where one doesn’t have any useful stops is considered a ‘dead walk’, like ‘dead air’ on the radio. With so many steps to do (around 15,000 every day in my case), we don’t really need the extra exercise! But we rarely truly ‘get a pace on’ either, as the stops are so frequent (never more so than at Christmas, where parcels fill the van and greetings cards stuff the mail bundles! And with all leave disallowed in December, there’s no getting out of it).
Also different is your mental state. Allow yourself to get into the walking too much, entering that lovely mind-state walkers get into where we can think over things that are on our mind, and you risk forgetting something important: your next parcel, collection, or special delivery. Despite what some might say, it is a mentally taxing job.
You’ve got to be driven
Gone are the days of the fully-on-foot postie; almost all jobs now require you to drive at least part of the day. We do a mix of walking and driving, in a pattern that appears complicated but, like the rest of the job, becomes second nature as repetitions increase.
Most areas are broken up into one-way or loop walks. Depending on the street layout, workload and van availability, there will be either one or two workers to a van. The van drives to a set point (call it ‘Point A’), and each postie does ‘their’ walk. If one or both of them has a loop walk, they complete it and then drive the van to ‘Point B’. If one of the pair has a one-way walk, they’ll meet the van at ‘Point B’. Post – meaning all letters and any packets small enough to be carried in the satchel bag – is delivered first, and then the van is usually driven around the walk to deliver any additional parcels too large to carry. Some depots have trolleys, but they haven’t proven to be useful in the area we’re in.
Although above I listed literacy, walking fitness and a driving licence as being the prerequisites to being a postie, those are just the entry-level. To become a really good postie, you also have to have charm and most of all a good memory, especially for sets of numbers.
Well-respected postman about town
Like most posties, it’s not the community I live in I serve, but it is one fairly nearby. Like many Slow Ways walks, I knew it to drive or cycle through with some haste but I had never stopped to learn the streets like I do now.
Three months in, it already feels as if I know the community I serve better than the back of my own hand. I’d say this shows the power of walking, of having business with everybody, and of having slight privileges such as being able to enter people’s private property without getting funny looks, getting waved through in traffic, and being able to park on double yellow lines for a short amount of time. As much as everyone says they ‘don’t want those bills’, they’re all quite happy to see the postie, really. For some people, we’re their only regular visitor.
It’s in this ‘community work’ aspect that it’s tempting to romanticise ‘the’ Royal Mail, but we must remember it’s been a private company for over a decade now. You’d be less likely to read an article about, say, being an Evri driver (a job I have also done); there is still a certain sense of duty among posties and respect from the public which your average Amazon driver doesn’t get. Ultimately, although the company still carries the royal crest, that romance is gone along with what once made posting a good job for those pursuing a simpler life. Old-timers speak with whimsy about ‘job and knock’, the practice that rewarded extreme efficiency with an early hometime. In these consumerist times, an early hometime would be a miracle on most duties. Almost everyone, even long-time posties who work 40-hour weeks, are on so-called ‘part-time’ contracts, with overtime a fact of life. So this may not be a job for those who, like me, wanted an easy ride.
Everyone, including Royal Mail’s job adverts, say that being a postie is a great way to stay fit. I’m not sure it’s that simple; there are a lot of long-time postal workers with various musculoskeletal or repetitive strain injuries, and there’s the other factor: imagine feeling that lovely feeling of tiredness after a long walk… every day. It’s difficult to motivate yourself after an exhausting day to, say, work on one’s article-writing sideline, or get out to do some sports.
But despite it all, it’s still a highly enjoyable job. I love the camaraderie at the depot; it’s a far cry from the cut-throat, putting-on-airs-and-graces world of consultancy I’ve recently departed. I love being trusted to literally deliver, I enjoy trying to race my ultra-fit colleague back to the van, I like being trusted to drive a van. I even sometimes love the rainy days as, yin and yang, it only makes the sunny days feel even brighter. I’ve certainly got a lot faster at walking and feel a lot more confident speaking to people than in my mouse-quiet office job. For the first time since I left my job at Slow Ways, I’m having fun at work.
Tom Morris
Tom, formerly editor of the Slow Ways stories blog during 2023, is an active travel activist and qualified transport planner. He is currently working as a postperson while completing a climbing instructor qualification and developing opportunities in theatre, writing, art and journalism.
Tom recently participated in Peak Cymru’s Peak Peers 2024 programme, where a group of young artists explored themes of land access and biodiversity in the Bannau Brycheniog.
Connect on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram, or email on [email protected].
