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catalogues’ plastic covers hitting the counter became monotonous, my eye kept being drawn to a row of Smurfs balanced on the copper pipe above the sink. They were covered in a thick layer of black dust. The postwoman knew things were not going well. In an anguished email she sent me after my visit, she wrote: ‘Many tears are dropping.’
    Another private postman, Joris Leijten, who quit Sandd a few months earlier, told me he used to sort mail on his bed. In a café among the grand villas of Bussum, near Hilversum, he handed me the flyer that Sandd put through his door after he resigned, advertising his job: a picture of four smiling white people in Sandd blue, striding down the road with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time,’ it read. ‘Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners.’ He showed me a day’s work from just after Christmas: three rounds, sorting and delivering 323 pieces of mail, weighing a total of 81.4 kilograms, to 279 addresses. Sandd claimed this should take six hours; Leijten said it took eight. For this he was paid a little over twenty-seven euros – not much more than three euros an hour.
    Sandd promotes the job as a ‘bijbaan’, a bit of work on the side for somebody who wants fresh air and exercise and already has a state pension, is studying or has a salaried husband. But Leijten, thirty-two and unable to get the museum job he’s trained for, is not alone in relying on several poorly paid bijbaans for his livelihood. I asked whether Sandd had given him anything besides eight cents a letter. Normally, he said, workers had to pay for their uniforms out of their wages. But the company also hands out ‘points’ every so often, which can be redeemed against a blue Sandd jacket.
    In the Netherlands, as in Britain, the postal market has been liberalised in the name of the consumer, as Europe’s former citizens are now known: competition, it is said, will benefit everybody. But competition, as Leijten noted, only really exists for large organisations. Private citizens can’t post letters in Sandd or Selekt mailboxes. There aren’t any. Ordinary Dutch people still had to pay forty-six cents to send a PostNL letter. The Dutch government, meanwhile, had negotiated a deal with Sandd to deliver some of its mail at eleven cents a pop. ‘For ordinary people, there’s no choice, there’s only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’
    On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who was Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail processing plant, built in 1999, that sucks in and shoots out every letter, packet and small parcel posted from or sent to every address in six hundred square miles of England, from the M25 down to the south coast, from Eastbourne in the east to Littlehampton at the westernmost edge of the county. They sort two and a half million items a day.
    Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He’s second-generation Irish. ‘My dad tells me I’m a plastic Paddy, nota real one,’ he said. He grew up on a council estate in Peckham and joined the Post Office as an apprentice postman in 1987, aged seventeen. He hated the early starts and was ready to quit after a few months. Instead they made him a trainee manager. Twenty-four years later he is a company star. Under Fehilly, Gatwick has embraced the philosophy of the Japanese management consultant Hajime Yamashina, which Royal Mail is trying to propel throughout the company. Yamashina visits Gatwick all the time. He was at the mail centre on the day the earthquake and tsunami struck his homeland. Fehilly’s eyes shone as he preached the Yamashina way. It starts with safety. All over the mail