I'm standing at the front gate, about to go for a run when he swings round the corner. He has a heavy looking bag over one shoulder into which are tightly folded perhaps forty or fifty copies of the local paper. It arrives every Thursday, but this is the first time I've encountered the deliverer.
'Just drop it in the box,' I say. 'I'm off for a run.'
'Name's Roy,' he says, extending a sinewy hand.
'Brian,' I say, slightly taken aback but shaking hands anyway.
Roy flicks a paper from his bag, rolls it once and puts it into the box next to the gate.
'Sensible box you've got there. Some of 'em are so small they'd hardly take a letter let alone a bloody newspaper. Personally I prefer those bits of 90mm PVC pipe for papers. Not much use for rain water – they split – but fine for rolled up papers or magazines. Mind you, newspaper's a bit of a misnomer for this bastard.'
He takes another paper from his bag and waves it in an arc. 'Full of real estate advertisements. Not much content there. So you're a runner?'
He speaks in a deep, modulated voice that seems to run on like a quiet stream. Just when you think you might answer, the flow smoothly resumes, and he is an adept prince of the non sequitur. I manage to explain to him that I'd been running to keep fit for about thirty years, but these days what I did was more of a jog. 'My marathon days are long gone,' I add with uneasy self-deprecation.
'I'm a walker,' he says. I realise he means officially a walker, employed by the company that distributes the local papers.
'I walk round all the courts, roads, boulevards, closes, circuits, avenues, lanes and parades – nothing as bloody mundane as a "street" round here. The pay's pretty ordinary, but you keep fit and it's quite interesting at times. Fr'instance, there's this bloke I met the other day. I'd just left a paper in his box when he called out to me. I thought he was going to complain about something, but he was polite and pleasant. "Don't leave any papers here if you don't mind," he said, "because I can't read." I thought for a minute he was having a lend of me. He was well dressed, well spoken. Funny how you automatically equate illiteracy with being down and