There were rivals for the title, but I still maintain that I was the worst, grumpiest and most pathetic excuse for a student Christmas relief postman ever inflicted on the good people of suburban Edinburgh. Dawn and my inner slob have never been on friendly terms. When it was very cold, very dark and truly wet I could have - and sometimes did - see enormous bags of printed rubbish far enough.

I grasped a couple of points along the way, however. One was that the real people who did the job year round, and who never had much reason to feel festive, worked six days in every week. I was astounded the practice was legal. Then I heard about how much they didn't get paid. As economists sometimes quantify these things, postal staff didn't get paid lots.

Still don't. When the suave and handsome Adam Crozier, executive in chief for Britain's mail, lectures these men and women on their duty to do as he sees fit, when he sees fit and for very cheap buttons, I merely wonder why they don't strike more often.

The point people miss about postal staff, and the very idea of a postal service, is twofold. First, we all take the service for granted. We won't know what we once had until it's gone. Secondly, your average postie is a fascinating individual.

Mail workers are the last of the industrial working class. When I last slouched around a sorting office all these men - and they tended to be men - had once been someone else. Dockers, miners, rail men, car workers: workers, once upon a time. They delivered the mail because that was what the job, the work, had become.

That explained the second fact: for the most part, these underpaid and maltreated public servants regarded their daily task as an obligation. Long before there was New Labour gibberish, they talked of "customers". Even in a freezing dawn they could attach names to faces. They knew when a senior citizen had been poorly. They knew when there was a baby in the house, or why number 14's dog wouldn't be worse off for a nudge with a boot.

They understood, I think, how the post connected communities, and made community real. Old Mrs Whatever would get her Christmas card from that daughter in Australia on the 24th because her little piece of cheer was the important reason for someone to rise at dawn, six days each week, and that was why "the Post Office" mattered. Here's a big deal no-one mentions: some people are alive this morning thanks only to an attentive postman who spotted something odd.

The phenomenon - and it deserves to be called phenomenal - was no different in the branches, over the counters, in tiny rural sub-offices or in the big city-centre halls. Once, not so many years ago, the postal service was as emblematic of Britain as the NHS, and almost as important, for very similar reasons. If the network has recently "ceased to compete" that has less to do with economic imperatives than with a metropolitan bigotry towards state provision. Sometimes it matters. Sometimes it is a matter of life and death.

The old sorting-office hands understood better than any management creep why splitting the service into counters, parcels and post was insane. It was, after all, a service: small, important word. Those workers couldn't see why an amenity was somehow obliged to "compete" with a business model fabricated to suit someone's hilariously surreal bottom line. Yet a government named for the party of organised labour is close to doing something that caused even Thatcher to quail.

First Balkanise, then privatise. Wreck it, then sell it. Leave it unloved - who loves queuing down at the post office, after all? - and no-one will notice or care when Glasgow loses 27 branches. Seven to go in Argyll and Bute, 10 in somewhere called "central" Scotland, and all because a public service is being obliged to "compete"? With what, or whom, and for what reason?

In due course, we are informed, the carnage will be "rolled out" across the country. In the meantime, we are to be granted a six-week "consultation". I'd love to laugh, about now, but my face appears to be stuck. "Consultation" is what passes for representative democracy in the early 21st century.

You know the drill. We all turn up, shout, bawl and make it abundantly clear we are a disaffected polity, sometimes a people. In response, they say what? That a policy of extraordinary societal vandalism, involving damage that can never be undone, will, of course, be abandoned forthwith? That will, of course, be right. You know, I know, and the people who employ the cheesy euphemisms know only too well that this is not what the word "consultation" is supposed to convey. The minister who signed off on the dismemberment policy - a delightful man, in the real world - was bestowing official approval on lunacy. Namely this: our government would rather not foot the bill for those essential services which, as taxpayers, we expect our government to provide.

So the postal network bleeds to death, through a lack of funding. B generally follows A. So essential arteries in our communities are severed. So we all grow accustomed, in the end, to a Britain in which the mail doesn't turn up, and simple documents must be procured "online", like it or not, and in which poor folk must cope as best they can, if they can.

It doesn't quite count as a metaphor, but it will do for my purposes. Might there not be something amiss with a country in which a twice-daily mail delivery is reduced, by degrees, to "not on a bank holiday"? Might there not be a problem or two when the postie isn't around to care for the pensioner, when no-one is manning the desk - because there is no desk - to ensure that the person who has trouble with words understands the forms?

I could be more precise. Some distressed MPs have grasped, as we reported yesterday morning, that the Post Office and the government regard the horrific closure programme as a "fait accompli". I'll bet they do. I can even hear those over-educated serious folk struggling to get their glossals around a tiny bit of foreign. The point about a real democracy, though, is that nothing should ever be ordained, or inevitable or beyond argument. Nothing should happen if it is not willed by the folk who queue every day at post office counters.

The single important fact I ever grasped as the world's worst-ever (all-comers) student postie was given to me on the parcels one cold winter afternoon. Nothing complicated, intellectual or ideological. Just a nice elderly lady sore afraid - her phrase - that her Christmas hamper wasn't going to turn up.

Where would she have been without her parcel, without the people who deliver parcels and pensions, good news and bad, who listen to the tales and end the morning with a human touch? The worst part was, she tried to give me a tip. It was, in bronze and silver, two and six. A different world.