I remember at the age of 3 or 4 years old sitting in the hallway waiting for the letters to come through the heavy wooden front door. There was a cage on the back to catch the mail.

I remember the silence. Then the footsteps coming up the path and the shuffling and rustling of paper. Then the shove of the mail through the aperture. Sometimes the mail would wedge across the top of the cage and the postman would have to wiggle it loose so it would drop through properly. The letterbox would thwack shut and the hallway would fall silent again.

I remember seeing postmen from the back seat of my dad’s Mini Traveller. I watched them duck down side streets I’d never been down. Where did they go? What did they see?

I remember my first day as a postman in 1988. Peter, my new boss, ran me out to the start of my delivery. I was nervous. It was my first full-time job. Peter laughed dismissively when we passed my old science teacher, Mr Allen, on the road up to the school. “You can tell he’s a teacher” he said “He’s wearing gloves”.

In his spare time Peter ran the Country Dancing evenings at the local youth club.

Over the next few years I got to duck down side streets too. I disappeared around corners and climbed stairwells. There was a man with no teeth who used to chase me for his Giro and somebody who threw fireworks at me.

I was bitten by a dog six times. The same dog. Six times.

On a late shift one winter’s night my van broke down on the moors and I had to walk half a mile to the nearest house to use the phone. Back at the van I waited for hours for help to arrive. It was the coldest I’ve ever been.

So I left the Royal Mail and I went to university in Liverpool. Knowing how expensive a good quality waterproof was I took my blue and red postman’s storm coat with me. When I wore it I’d occasionally see groups of postal workers from the big sorting office on Copperas Hill and they’d always say hello.

I returned to Huddersfield with my new degree in Art and Geography but no lucrative opportunities presented themselves so I re-joined the Royal Mail.

The streets, much as they are now, were made of asphalt, Haribo wrappers, tracksuits, hooded tops, salwar kameez, purple anoraks, buses, butterflies, buzzards, 1980s chart hits, double denim, dressing gowns, flip-flops, footballs, Ford Fiestas, Mr Mahmood and Mrs Moorhouse queueing for the cash machine, the smell of weed, bacon, dog piss, wheelie bins… Nothing was happening but it was all happening at the same time.

I was constantly on the move and the world was in flux: connections were loose, context was unstable, conversations were disconnected and meaning elusive.

My initial response was to have a bit of a breakdown and for a while I mainly shouted at pigeons or scrawled angry polemics with no punctuation onto small scraps of paper. I didn’t have time for basic grammar because I was far too busy being cross. My impotent rage was easily stirred by unavoidable everyday encounters with cheap garden ornamentation, the casual prejudices of some of my customers and dogs and their excrement. I was writing all this down though, which was the start.

A diary entry from November 6th, 2003 reads “I hate this fucking place because it’s shit”.

Gradually I remembered more measured voices from my studies in Liverpool: Paul Klee wanting to be ‘as though newborn’, André Bazin’s ‘impassive lens’ and most significantly, the ‘motiveless appraisal’ of the Boyle Family, a group of artists who randomly selected sections of the earth’s surface and recreated them in perfect detail to hang on art gallery walls. I considered all these ideas and tried to incorporate them into my writing in an attempt to make sense of my unfathomably mundane surroundings.

I was once delivering the mail to a pub when I overheard a group of sixth form students in the beer garden. One of them casually remarked that “Smoking in the shower is the most difficult thing ever”. This stuck in my mind so when it came to formalising my postal service writing in blog form I chose The Most Difficult Thing Ever as the title.

In 2018 The Most Difficult Thing Ever became the book Round About Town when it was published by Uniformbooks.

I continued with my postal journals until 2025 when I finally drew a line under the whole obsession. It’s been over a year since I packed it in now and I’m still taking things a day at a time.

Here are a few highlights from over the years:

May 2004

My neighbour calls round to see if I have any Blu-Tack in the house. He says he has a picture of a magnificent leopard and he wants to put it up on his cupboard. He asks me whether I’d ever heard a cheetah purr. I say no. He has though, on the radio in Canada. What a tremendous noise!

July 2006

In the smoking room Jane from the callers’ office tells me she’s very stressed. She’s hunched over with her legs crossed on one of those torn blue vinyl seats with the squashed foam poking out. She picks at her nails with one hand and holds her cigarette in the other. “All I do is deal with complaints and I haven’t got time. They all come to me because it’s the only place they can speak to a member of staff” she explains. She takes a long drag on her cigarette and lowers her brow. “And they’re really fucking rude”.

October 2007
At Mr Haigh’s today I have to step over a dead cow to get to his front door.

January 2008

10.30am: At one of the bungalows on the estate I skirt around the five-berth Crusader Storm on the drive and knock at the front door. A slim woman with an old fashioned perm and twinset sits with her back to the window talking with a similarly presented woman in an armchair opposite. Nobody responds so I try again. Still nobody comes. I can see the back of the woman’s head through the glass and she hasn’t moved. I reach across and tap on the window. She still doesn’t move. I peer inside and realise she is in fact a shop mannequin and the other woman is her reflection in the large mirror propped against the opposite wall. I take the parcel to the woman at the house next door and mention the neighbour’s front room tableau. “Oh, that’s Barbara” she explains. “They always leave her there like that when they’re away. She’s very convincing, isn’t she?”

February 2011

An old man shouts me from the first floor of the flats. “How long before you get here, lad?” “About half an hour” I say. He tells me to get a move on. He says he’s been waiting for me. He says he’s got to go out and I’ve made him late. He’s dressed in pyjamas.

December 2014

A woman in a big anorak is holding a bag-for-life as she talks to a group of other women with bags-for-life. “I don’t feel the cold anymore because I’ve got…” she stops to think for a moment and then turns to the woman in the enormous scarf next to her. “What is it I’ve got, Joyce?”
“Diabetes” says Joyce.
“No!” says the anorak woman, remembering, “A onesie”.

July 2015

It starts to rain and the old woman at the farm asks whether I’ve got a mac in my van. I say I have and she gives me a double thumbs up and a big grin. “Well go and put it on, I can see the blobs all over your shirt.”

November 2016

At the entrance to the flats, two men in their sixties are engaged in a loud debate about lorne sausage. “It shouldn’t be called sausage at all because it’s square and sausages are round. It’s more like a square burger” insists the one with the bit of arse crack showing. The one without the bit of arse crack showing counters “If it’s sausage meat, it’s sausage. End. Of.”

March 2020

6.00am. Driving sleet storms my waterproofs. Cars skim through the deluged streets. A noisy wagon sluices spray from the gutter and the thrush in the tree at the entrance to the park is singing so loudly I can hear it from Dingle Road, 250 yards away. Street lamps refract through the telegraph wire raindrops which hang across the road like a garland of fairy lights and at the bus stop, the man in the smart black suit and Parka jacket is smoking some very strong weed.

May 2020

I tell John I’ve cancelled my birthday celebrations because of lockdown and he tells me the whole coronavirus thing is a hoax. He shows me a film he shot on his phone of the UFO hovering above his house a couple of weeks ago. I tell him he should show it to our boss who is an expert on UFOs. He says he was once abducted by aliens from Pendle Hill.

May 2020
“I think I might be pregnant” says a man to his neighbour over a weathered overlap fence. “How come?” says the neighbour. “I’ve been eating a whole cucumber every day these last few weeks.” “They’re ever so refreshing though, aren’t they?”

September 2020

I knock at the house with the sign above the front door: “Peter and Barbara Whitwam are not licensed to sell intoxicating liquors but will ensure that everybody leaves the premises legless”. A minute or so fumbling for keys then Peter answers. He’s not wearing any trousers.

October 2021

“Bloody Hell, that stinks,” says Julie, holding up a parcel. She thrusts it under my nose “Smell that. I’ve got to have that in my van with me all day!”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Joss sticks. I can’t put up with that all day. To me, that’s what hippies smell like.”

June 2022

6.30am: On the flyover above the ring-road in town, I pass a man in a dressing gown and pyjamas. He is carrying a sixteen pack of toilet roll.

8.00am: We’re prepping our deliveries when Julie asks if there’s anywhere to get a good breakfast in the Scisset area. Verity says she’s never really looked into Scisset for breakfast opportunities.

October 2022

Irene’s not so good on her feet these days so I open the door and give her a shout. “Who’s that?” she shouts back. “Kevin. It’s just your post!” “Pop it on the chair dear, I’m in the loo. I’m having a pee”.

March 2025

There’s a man on my post round who is rude and arrogant. He rarely speaks to me except to pick fault and complain. I’m conscientious and polite but I’ve not had anything approaching a smile from him and certainly never any thanks. Recently I’ve noticed my irritation with him spreading to include not only he himself but things I associate with him too: his car, the shrubs in his garden, the magazines he subscribes to, the way he stores the tools in his shed. His stupid moustache. I think this is the result of having to maintain a degree of professional civility. The normal way to deal with someone like this would be to either avoid them or confront them but as it is my resentment has taken a pathological turn and been displaced onto things that are really quite peripheral.