It is not London's posties who are failing to deliver

Royal Mail's managing director says their attitude "beggars belief".

The chief executive, Adam Crozier, says industrial action is an "appalling and unjustified attack on customers". Huff, puff.

Would it be the stupidest thing in the world to wonder whether - rather than hoping to commit mass suicide by destroying the company that employs them, or making war on customers for the fun of it - the thousands of postal workers going out on strike have a legitimate grievance?

Is it worth considering that, in the hopes of salvaging its broken business model, the management of the Royal Mail are demanding that its least-well-paid workers do more work for the same money, and that these workers are entitled to object?

There's no doubt the company is up the spout. The Royal Mail last year made an operating profit of £321million.

But more than a million quid of that went into Adam Crozier's pocket, and the company still has a hole in its pension fund expected to rise to £8 billion next year.

Most of the profit came from delivering junk mail.

According to an interesting article by an actual postman in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, postmen are paid 1.67p per item of junk mail they deliver - a figure that has not changed in 10 years.

They are not entitled to claim overtime if their burden of junk mail pushes their shift over length and they are not entitled to refuse to deliver it.

The Royal Mail's management claims that the volume of mail has gone down by 10 per cent. Our postie, on the other hand, attributes this figure to management arbitrarily changing the basis on which they estimate the volume of mail.

They used to assume each box in which mail arrives at the post office contained 208 letters. Now they have decided each box contains 150 letters. (A manual count organised by the union put the actual figure at 267. And our postie has a sore back.)

Sure, many people do now use email. But they still send Christmas cards. And the Post Office had 30 per cent more workers in the days before eBay, LoveFilm and Amazon.

There's every possibility, here, of mutually assured destruction. I think it's time the Royal Mail's management, whose responsibility it is that the company's up the spout in the first place, spent less time trying to turn the general public against its postmen and more time trying to come to a decent accommodation.

And perhaps tantrum-prone Lord Mandelson could be reeled back from "beyond anger" into a zone where he'll be useful to somebody.

Viz, alive and kicking

This winter Viz comic celebrates its 30th anniversary, and up and down the country, men of about my age will be celebrating with the cry of: "Viz? Is that still going, then?"

It is still going, and if you stopped reading it, I can't urge you too strongly to start again. In addition to newspaper satire every bit as sharp as Private Eye's, Viz's regular characters are Chaucer's General Prologue for 21st-century Britain.

Its genius is that, in addition to an unrivalled collection of jokes about farts and poos, it has real poignancy. The great figures of strip cartoons - from Charlie Brown's having the football pulled away to Krazy Kat being beaned by a brick - always seem to be caught in a repeating moment. So it is with those in Viz.

Biffa Bacon begins each strip hoping for his parents to be nice to him and ends it with Mutha's boot in his teeth. Suicidal Syd always sets out to commit suicide, then fails, then dies by accident just as he finds a reason for living. There are human truths here.

No, Viz is one of the glories of our age. Long may it flourish.

Another one rubs the lamp

Forget Samuel Beckett. Pantomime is surely the most desolating spectacle the theatre has to offer: a greasepainted reminder of the vanity of human wishes and the yawning mouth of the grave.

All that mirthless jocularity, all those formulaic shout-outs, all those half-remembered faces from the TV of your childhood looking harrowed and defeated, like the patient in the bed nearest the door. It is too terrible.

Now it has claimed Pamela Anderson. Once, bonnie and beaming, Pammie was the most famous woman on the face of the Earth. This Christmas she's doing a two-week run as the Genie in Aladdin in Wimbledon.

Aladdin in Wimbledon. Like the protagonist in Browning's poem A Toccata of Galuppi's, I feel chilly and grown old

What is the Prime Minister's favourite biscuit? He refuses to say, apparently. In an online chat with contributors to the parenting website Mumsnet, he was repeatedly asked whether he was a ginger snap or a rich tea kind of guy, and repeatedly dodged the question.

No doubt he regarded it as trivial. Well. If the forums you choose for public engagement are Mumsnet and GMTV's sofa, rather than the Today programme and Newsnight, these are the sorts of questions you must expect to answer. You cannot have your biscuit and eat it.