It's never too late to live out your childhood dream

There is nothing especially demeaning about being downwardly mobile at the end of one's life, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

A POSTMAN picks up a letter from a pile, looks at the address and slowly puts it into a pigeonhole. Then he takes another and repeats the process. Nearby, a group of colleagues stand watching him.

They are worried about him as they can see things aren’t quite right. Later, they discover that he has been threatened by a violent thug and so pay the thug a visit and spray him with red paint. Job done, the biggest of them – fondly known as “Meatballs” – triumphantly explains the reason for his heroism: “I’m a f***ing postman!”

A few days after I watched this unlikely scene from Looking for Eric, Ken Loach's new comedy, I heard the same words repeated by an acquaintance at a garden party in Oxfordshire – though this time without the expletive.

The last time I’d seen this man he was the marketing director of a business that sold organic TV dinners. But since then his company had been sold to a multinational and, after a brief spell as a consultant to the new buyer, he had been eased out altogether.

For a while he had looked for similar work, but discovered that in a recession, no one wants to pay an unemployed 56-year-old a six-figure salary to work in marketing. So he thought again and decided to try his hand at the job that he had wanted to do ever since he was a boy. He looked at me triumphantly. “I’m a postman,” he said.

“Blimey,” I said. “What’s it like?” He said it was quite the best job he’d ever had.

And then I thought of the film and wondered if Loach was right after all. Was there a special camaraderie among men who put letters through the holes in doors? Or was the less sentimental US view of postmen more accurate – that they are less likely to help their colleagues than to kill them?

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a spate of nasty incidents in US post offices where workers went nuts and started shooting workmates – as a result of which there is the special expression “to go postal” to describe anyone who gets uncontrollably angry at work.

My acquaintance confirmed that his fellow postmen were neither terribly nice nor terribly nasty. There was no heart-warming camaraderie; instead there was a mild hostility caused by the fact that he works part time and they resent part-timers. He pitches up at a relatively leisurely 7.30am to deliver the letters that full-timers have already been sorting for two hours. Morale, in any case, was quite low. The business is contracting at about 10 per cent a year and postmen are now being forced to walk faster and deliver back-breaking quantities of junk mail.

So why was he so happy? I wondered. It could hardly be the money – his gross pay of £235 (€274) a week is a 10th of what he used to make. But even that, he said, didn’t bother him. His kids had left home and he had some savings from his old job.

He thought it a fair rate for the job and told me that the previous week he had made some overtime and felt rich because he could buy a takeaway pizza out of the extra.

He explained that what he really liked about the job was that it was healthy. Four hours spent walking was an inherently happier way of spending one’s time than four hours sitting on one’s bottom. Maybe; yet to me lugging a bag up and down the stairs of dismal council flats still didn’t seem like a recipe for happiness.

He said he also liked the contact with the people – when you deliver people’s mail you get to know a good deal about them. But this wasn’t a proper answer either. There is no time for a modern postman to do much more than say “morning!” and pass on swiftly.

But then he said something that made more sense. His new job had allowed him to reclaim his mind. When he goes home at 1pm every day, he does not have to give work another thought until 7.30am the next day. In his old job, worries from the office took up permanent residence in his head, making his synapses too ragged to allow him to focus properly on anything else. Then I started to realise why he loves this job so much.

It has nothing to do with how nice it is to be a postman in absolute terms, but how nice it is relative to being a senior manager.

He enjoys lugging his big bag because he knows what the alternative is. He knows how wretched it is spending your working life trying to get people to do things they don’t want to do and bearing responsibility for things that you can’t change.

The only good things about being a top manager are status and money; if you ignore those, then being a postman is a much nicer way of passing the time. At 56, he said he had got beyond status and, as he had a small pile of savings, he was ready to be a manual worker.

The Japanese know all about this. There are plenty of older people who do manual work – any work is seen as better than no work – and there is nothing especially demeaning about being downwardly mobile at the end of one’s life.

This seems to me a perfectly good way of ending one’s career: doing redeeming manual work almost as a hobby, subsidised by savings from fatter times. The model has one fatal flaw: the jobs are being taken away from younger people who might enjoy the work less, but who, alas, need the money more. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009