The stuffing of the flyers

Little did I think on retirement in 2011 that six years later my chief occupation would be traipsing round the streets of North Oxford, delivering publicity material to the good burghers of my adopted home city. Lest you should think otherwise, I have not embarked on a second career in marketing nor have I become a leading charity guru; the operation is  concerned solely with family business, both professional and recreational,  --  and it is quite interesting.

I ply my gentle, generous trade at all times of the year, from the depths of bleak midwinter when fingers are frozen and fumbling, the leaflets limp and languid,  to the serene acme of high summer, when one might rather be watching the colourful action at Wimbledon or England suffering humiliation again at Trent Bridge.

My patch includes Crick Road, the most prosperous street in England outside London, where the average property value is in excess of £5 million. Here the gates can be forbiddingly austere, the letter boxes in grand design style in bronze [ or is it gold? ] and my wares are probably no more than fodder for the recycling plant which nestles alongside the underground gymnasium complex.

Moving on, the next social grouping evade the sullying effect and security risk of a front door aperture, preferring an adjacent separate receptacle, of dubious aesthetic merit, causing us humble deliverers to wonder if the legion of Filipino staff, released temporarily from the cupboard in the scullery, will pass our important publications on to the Spectator reading home owner.

But many around here are liberally minded, Guardian taking Remainers with strikingly coloured front doors and reasonably conventional letter boxes. These latter, however, come in as many shapes and sizes as there are members of the House of Lords and we lowly posting folk, weighed down with a satchel and encumbered by a fistful of anything but dollars, struggle to contend with the opening at ankle level ; the vertical model at head height; the fitfully fighting, heavily sprung version which requires firm fist work; and the diminutive delicacy which necessitates folding even an A5 sheet, thus ensuring it will be confused with publicity material from a local eatery, publicising the merits of Zeffirelli's Zambian Zabaglione. And there may still be the resistant bristles of the draft excluder, where puncturing the gap is the equal of getting the better of Leonidas in the pass at Thermopylae. How we long for the waist high, generously proportioned, easy swinging, hear it drop on to the mat, letter box.

Here are challenges enough, you might think, but there are more ahead, specifically which residences do we avoid? Flats with single entry, multiple occupancy always seem a waste of time as does delivery to a house which is surrounded by a powerful imitation of the Lost Garden of Heligan or where the building itself resembles areas of Mosul when ISIS has moved out. Then there are the unwelcoming signs: ' No cold callers  '; ' No free papers '; ' We do not buy or sell at this door. Please go away and do not return '. Of all these, unfriendly antisocial signs [' safe within my womb; I touch no-one and no-one touches me '], which frequently spoil the look of the front door anyway, the most reprehensibly objectionable is ' No Junk Mail '. What an insult, I think to myself; who are you to set yourself up as the judge of what is junk and what is not, especially before you have even seen the item? Would I really be delivering this to your house, if I thought it was ' junk '? The blood boils and I fulminate but only inwardly of course as I am a mere hireling:

There was an old man with a flyer,
Whose zeal was raised ever higher;
He scorned signs on doors,
Hoped resident bores
Might taste the great plague and hellfire.

The poet Milton put it somewhat more elegiacally:

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' omnipotent to arms.

And that, I confidently predict, when the day of judgement comes, will be the fate and just deserts of all those vile bodies in OX2 who put ' No Junk Mail ' signs on their front doors.

However, I have to remind myself, I am not here  --  or there or anywhere  --  in this context to express my own views or to fight moral crusades so I discipline myself never to curse audibly. Stopping to speak to the locals is on the inadvisable to attempt list too; I recently spent five minutes in Davenant Road extolling the virtues of Noel Coward as a playwright, only to discover that my audience was a group of temporary French visitors who had not understood a word of what I had said. But above all, however great the temptation, one must not look through windows to see the internal layout and furnishing of this particular house or  --  yet more potentially perilous  --  what excitements may be taking place within.

On a recent dreich November evening I was cruising through the charming village of Wolvercote with my pack on my back, delivering literature to the estimable inhabitants of the enviable Meadow Prospect, thus described as from their houses the view over Port Meadow to the dreaming spires is uninterrupted and beautiful. The letter box before me was tough  --  tight, smallish and with an uncooperative draft excluder; it needed resolute stuffing. I was struggling and could not help disobeying my own rule about peeping, as the top half of the door was glass and all behind was quite apparent.

And then she appeared, coming down the stairs towards me. She might have been described as ' nubile ' but I am never sure what that word means; or perhaps she was neo-classical, had you been studying her form in the Uffizi and I use these terms because one thing about her was certain: she was naked. I was busily  --  and not without discomfort  --  thrusting my hand through the forest-like draft excluder, my frame right up against the glass and she just kept on coming; Stonewall Jackson riding ahead. By now our faces were only inches apart, my hand still trapped in the opening as I thought about all those recent harassment cases in the newspapers, when thankfully she picked up a towel and draped it, in the nature I suppose of one who knows how they behave in films,  from her mouth. I tried to justify my actions by talking about Hay Fever but why was I only mouthing the words and saying nothing?

She smiled  --  well sort of, not an easy task with a towel in your mouth  --  I smiled; the leaflet dropped on to the mat; my hand was wrenched free with considerable resulting pain; I fled into the shadows of Wolvercote, all smiles stopped together and for certain I will not return too soon.

And  this of course goes to show, gentlemen, that you shouldn't try to talk to a damsel when you're in distress yourself.

15th December 2017