WHY I TRAMP THE STREETS IN SEARCH OF RUBBER BANDS

The kind men and women who in all weathers deliver our daily post, wrap it in bundles with pink rubber bands. They probably do this elsewhere as well. Twenty or thirty letters and brochures held together ready to drop through the letterboxes of this or that cluster of houses. Maybe it’s even done by postcode, I don’t know.

What I do know is that these are very fine rubber bands, and of a durability and elasticity reminiscent of the days when windows of railway carriages were opened with a leather strap. I imagine a little factory, somewhere like Leeds or Dumbarton, deep anyway in the British hinterland, where son has followed father in this traditional manufacture - supported by the same, government contract, rolled over year by year.

The postal folk rushing around on their deliveries, on foot or bicycle, at the regulation so many miles-per-hour, remove the bands before delivering the mail, placing them carefully on a handlebar or in a pocket so that they may be used again. Inevitably a few bands are dropped.

Now I value these rubber bands. They come in two sizes. The larger ones are exactly the right size for closing a roll of labels wound on a three inch diameter core. The smaller ones are exactly the right size for a one inch core. So when I find one lying on the pavement - as I did this morning - I pick it up eagerly. This gives me a double pleasure: I believe I am tidying the streets and the atavistic instincts of my hunter-gatherer nature are satisfied. Rarely a day goes by when I do not manage to pick up at least one and bear it proudly home. It’s a sort of Sarah Palin feeling, I suppose, without the need for gunfire.

I mentioned this the other day to Delphine, our ultra-efficient and helpful assistant in the Post Office where I go each afternoon carrying a Marks and Spencer shopping bag containing packets of labels to be despatched urgently hither and thither.

Unfortunately, she said, she had no rubber bands to give me. However, if some came her way she would, set them aside. At that point Sam, who was pursuing some post office business of his own at the next window, intervened. “I’ve got a bucketful” he said. “I’d be glad to get rid of them.”

Sam runs a superior travel agency in town. Not only that but he has a habit of collecting honorary consulships like other people collect stamps. An impressively royal coat of arms outside his office proclaims that it is here that distressed Norwegians in search of a friendly hand should repair. Assuming, that is, that the place isn’t full of distressed Tunisians seeking the same thing.

I know Sam not so much through our occasional coincidental encounters at the Post Office but from the bi-annual receptions that the European Commission hold in Cardiff for those involved in some way with European affairs. When I am not selling labels I write articles about Europe and for a short time last year was the part-time UK representative on a sadly terminated European communications project. I think, anyway, that is why they invite me.

Labels and Europe are two activities just about as distant in the occupational spectrum as it is possible to get. I arrive at the Post Office, tired and dishevelled, frequently in jeans and sweater, with a bulging and inelegant bag of parcels, my conversation limited to rubber bands and recorded deliveries, only subsequently to reappear groomed and talking with something that could passably be taken for erudition about the threats and opportunities to Britain of joining the euro. This perplexes Sam. Me too, sometimes, when people ask innocently, “what do you do?”

Never mind! I am still, if you remember, looking for those robust and elastic pink Post Office rubber bands. So Sam invites me to drop into his agency the next day and collect his small surplus, the postmen clearly delivering several each day with the agency’s mail. This, in great expectation, I do, only to find that the fabled ‘bucketful’ is nowhere to be found. The staff confirmed that although once such a bucketful did indeed exist, sadly someone must have ‘tidied up.’ My disappointment was palpable.

So I am back tramping the streets again, looking for these little circles of pink rubber. Meanwhile I have to put up with the inferior products of stationery suppliers who trade only in products made in some Asian fastness. Never the correct size, nor very elastic, they break with a twang at the slightest provocation, zapping your fingers in the process. Oh! If only I could find that factory in Leeds or Dumbarton that made the rubber bands which held the Empire together!