The Universal Service

Monday's Channel 4 Dispatches report on the Royal Mail made depressing watching, particularly for such a remote community as ours.

Royal Mail isn't working very well - no-one disputes that - but it offers us an amazing service. In a world where more and more people are buying goods on-line, an item ordered from Amazon using its Royal Mail first class service usually reaches us the next day. The same package sent by another internet company, via carrier, is delivered when the carrier next happens to come out here - and some only make it once a week - and often demands a extra payment because we are remote.

The reason Royal Mail is so much better is that, under section 4 of the Postal Services Act 2004, Royal Mail has a legal requirement to deliver every day to every address in the UK at the same price. The carriers don't, so they concentrate their efforts in those areas which make them money, mainly the cities, where they have taken much of the business that used to make Royal Mail's profit.

That theft, idleness, constant disputes and poor management are endemic in the Royal Mail work places that Dispatches visited must have surprised no-one: they filmed, for the second time, in East London. Perhaps, next time, Dispatches would like to film out here on remote Ardnamurchan where, it's said, delivering a first class letter with a 39p stamp actually costs somewhere in excess of £5. The daily service offered by our two posties, Gillespie and Marie, is superb - efficient, cheerful and honest - and we'd hate to lose it.

A light frost powdered the ground this morning, though the air temperate hardly dropped below zero. Just before nine in the morning, as we walked down to the shop, a skein of geese flew noisily over, heading towards Mull: the photo shows them over the Sound against a background of the masts at Glen Gorm.