The other day, the Allied Irish Bank called up. Normally, calls from this quarter are a delicate way of telling me I have overrun my overdraft. T

This time, my manager said mysteriously that their systems had identified “unusual activity” on my account. Had I been issuing cheques for large sums?

Actually no; I say a little prayer every time I pass over a cheque for more than £40. What kind of large cheque? For thousands of pounds, she said. WHAT? I squealed. Get away.

It turns out that the bank had sent me a new
chequebook, which hadn't arrived. Someone had used it to issue cheques for: £9,836; £9,300; £4,765; £6,830; £4,860; £4,700. Reader, I have never seen sums like this in my bank statement without the letters DR after them.

I turned up at the local parcel collection depot to talk to the sorting office manager, a delightful older man. The problem was, I told him, that whereas we once had a regular, good postman called Sean, after he resigned, his place was taken by a succession of casual delivery people. Some of the post arrived looking interfered with. And in this case of my chequebook, it appeared that some chancer in the sorting office or on the postal rounds may have taken it.

Right then, a middle-aged woman came out with a parcel. “Exactly the same thing happened to me,” she said. “Someone took my chequebook, and tried to get thousands of pounds with it.” Not a one-off then.

There's a bigger point here. When the Royal Mail used to be run as a public service, it was able to retain staff who'd stay in their jobs long enough to know their patch.

Now it's turning out profits of £255 million a year, it employs casual staff instead, whose names you never know. And the losers are those of us who pay for it.

* The new, refurbished Shepherd's Bush station is a wonder to behold, as clean and shiny as the old one was down-at-heel. It's only when you visit with a pushchair that you notice what's missing.

A lift. Or an escalator to the platforms. You wonder: do the executives at TfL not have elderly relations, ? Do they never travel by Tube with a buggy, trying to seek out stations with escalators? Have they never had the torture of getting out of Victoria station with enormous suitcases? I can quite see that to put lifts into every station would cost more than the London Olympics. But if you are refurbishing one anyway, why not put a lift in?

* Ah, Meryl Streep. Dragged on stage to get an award from the Screen Actors Guild for her latest movie, Doubt, in which she plays an improbable hatchet-faced nun called Sister Aloysius, she declared that she hadn't expected to be honoured. “I didn't even bother to get a dress,” she drawled. And there she was in her black trouser suit, looking nothing short of fabulous, and, coming up for 60, effortlessly outclassing the girls half her age. What a dame.

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