The Night Mail's last post

The recent inclusion in this column of the Latin phrase "purgamentum init, exit purgamentum" (garbage in, garbage out) has generated letters by the Sackfuls (that's the Sackful brothers, Kevin and Clint, of Crouch End). They've written in to ask if I have any other Latin phrases that might come in useful, because "we'll shortly be going on holiday to Latin America".

Well, "volo comparare nonnulla tegumembra" (I'd like to buy some condoms) could be handy if you meet someone at the "orbium phonographicorum theca" (disco), and if the usherette at a "pellicula cinematographica obscena" (porn movie) tells you that "braccae tuae aperiuntur", she'll be warning you that your fly is undone. And when you get back from your vacation, remember that the legal expression "ex post facto" can be modified into "ex post fucto" to indicate your displeasure when the postman pushing your holiday snaps through the letterbox disproves the legend on the now-creased envelope: "Photographs - do not bend."

"Ex post fucto" ought to have been the motto of the Royal Mail employees on last night's Homeground: The End of the Line (BBC2). For more than 150 years, Travelling Post Offices (TPO) have been traversing the railway system by night, sorting the nation's letters in time for the morning delivery, but now they're being axed and the postal workers are understandably furious.

The romance that has long surrounded these famous red trains was well illustrated by a clip from WH Auden's 1936 classic Night Mail (an atmospheric poem that rhymes "her course" with "across", thereby betraying its author's exceedingly upper-class accent), but nostalgia counts for little in today's market-driven economy. By next January, they'll all have disappeared and, as this quietly angry documentary showed, the reason lies not with the hard-working employees who handle the first-class mail, but with the decidedly second-class males (and females) in management.

The cameras followed the staff on The East Anglian, as they made one of their last nocturnal trips from Norwich to Dover, via the national distribution centre in north London. With their train (and their jobs) under a death sentence, a certain gallows humour had developed among the employees, and they bleakly joked about how they had rechristened their TPO Tired and Pissed Off, and openly declared that the Royal Mail is now "being run by amateurs", with no feeling for tradition.

Although they complained about the cramped conditions and antisocial hours, their main frustration was with the cavalier way the rail service is being jettisoned in favour of road distribution, and everyone we heard from spoke with bitterness. Well, I suppose it's only natural to be bitter, what with having to sift through 170,000 letters each day, only to discover that none of them is ever for you.

The choice of music for the soundtrack was somewhat erratic, with some Miles Davis capturing the sombre mood perfectly, while an extract from the opening of Carmina Burana (with speeded-up footage) was crass and ill-judged. Furthermore, there should have been some archive of the Great Train Robbery, which was surely the most notorious moment in the history of the TPO, as well as Ronnie Biggs's second-greatest felony (the first being the way he conned everyone into thinking he was at death's door two years ago, in hopes that the authorities would be lenient with him).

But, as the cameras lingered on the elegant wooden pigeon-hole sorting system that's barely changed since Victorian times, the film achieved its purpose by poignantly conveying how yet another part of this country's heritage is being tossed on to the scrapheap, purely because of successive governments' obsession with breaking up the Post Office's monopoly. That's why the service is falling apart, and why the TPOs are disappearing, and as the one manager brave (or unwise) enough to give an interview eventually admitted: "The Royal Mail will not survive in the 21st century on sentiment alone."

Too few documentaries nowadays are made with passion, so despite its imperfections, I applaud this one for having the courage to wear its heart on its sleeve. The East Anglian made its final trip last Friday, and within months the last Night Mail will be pulling up Beattock, a steady climb, and yet another fragment of our national history will have been consigned to a museum.

Ah well, everything getting uglier and nastier is the price we must pay for progress in Tony B Liar's Brave New World, and as I watched a TPO chuntering forlornly through the night and waking the residents long before porridge time, I suddenly thought of Molly Parkin (a woman who once described me as looking like two unmade beds). The last time I saw her, she was walking into a hushed restaurant, shouting: "Sorry I'm late. The postman woke me up at five o'clock this morning. That's the last f***ing time I sleep with him."