The miracle of Christmas mail

If you are going to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, you would be ill-advised to start in Marylebone High Street. Should a crow be foolish enough to attempt the trip, it would have to fly about 700 miles.

That is the kind of journey the Royal Mail is duty-bound to make should someone take it into their head to post a letter in Marylebone addressed to the main centre of population on the wind-swept Western Isle. And if you pay 32p for a stamp, the Post Office will make an effort to deliver the letter the next day, although some parts of the island are considered too remote to qualify under the Royal Mail's "Universal Service Obligation" which covers almost 27 million addresses in the UK. The latest audited figures show that 94.5 per cent of first-class letters arrive the following day.

The Independent decided to accompany just such a letter on its journey from central London to Donald MacRitchie of Torquill Terrace, Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis off north-west Scotland.

Our letter was popped into the post box at 3.55pm and five minutes later, at the appointed time, a man in a van, Rodney McPherson, turned up, opened the post box, stuffed the letters into a sack, placed it in a van and took it to a cavernous, dingy sorting office near Paddington station. Here, 1,000 workers process mail from all over west London, although much of the sorting is handled by machine. Letters are "read" by the massive contraptions at the rate of about 20,000 an hour.

Some items can cause a bout of indigestion in the machine and are regurgitated because they are either illegible, unintelligible or both. The rejects are read remotely in Plymouth where postal workers at 565 work stations sit in readiness to help the machine out of its difficulties. The Royal Mail says it is the biggest data entry centre in the world.

Along one side of the sorting floor, where 1.5 million items are processed every 24 hours, there are a dozen or more sinister-looking, darkened windows behind which inspectors sit to ensure the honesty of those processing the letters and parcels.

The centre's manager, John Doyle, says no one knows when the spooks from Post Office Security and Intelligence Services are in residence. Access to the upstairs corridor is by ladder and through a private entrance for which only the special security staff have keys. The Post Office says that only 0.0006 per cent of letters and parcels are lost and stolen each year. But that is 200,000 items a year.

Our letter for Stornoway joins other items with first-class stamps to be taken to Stansted for the flight north. Other letters bound for Scotland with second-class stamps are siphoned off to be carried by road. Only at Christmas is the night mail train, immortalised by WH Auden, still in use. Regular mail trains were pensioned off nearly two years ago, saving the organisation about £10m a year.

The tedious journey from west London to the Essex airport takes us two hours across rush-hour London and along the A12 and the M11 where the traffic thins out. We arrive at 9.30pm and the mail is unloaded, placed in "York" trolleys and taken to a security screen to ensure they contain nothing which could endanger the mail plane. A sign emblazoned with the legend "Mad house" adorns an office door at the depot although the psychosis, one suspects, is no greater than any other workplace.

The sacks are placed in large boxes ready to be taken to the apron for loading on to the Royal Mail Boeing 737. The aircraft, liveried in Post Office red, takes off for Edinburgh at five past midnight - about 15 minutes late - with 13 tons of mail for distribution all over Scotland. The plane lands at 1am, five minutes early, and postal workers get to grips with it.

Half a dozen buggies tugging trailers rush to the plane. The workers are meant to unload the aircraft in 20 minutes and supervisors are present to ensure the target is met. Tonight they take a couple of minutes longer after one of the boxes gets stuck. The floor of the aircraft is covered in fist-sized ball-bearings so that the boxes, weighing from two to three tons can be pushed by hand off the plane.

The trailers take them to another sorting office at Edinburgh airport where our letter is designated for loading on a flight to RAF Kinloss on the Moray Firth. The aircraft, a turbo-prop Shorts 360, The Spirit of Fraser Coast, takes off late for its journey north over the sleeping towns and villages of eastern Scotland.

News of the delay concerns nervous Royal Mail managers who are aware that tonight their performance is under scrutiny. The Independent, together with the BBC, is monitoring the progress of the mail. In fact, the plane arrives four minutes early at 2.16am and a red Post Office van comes to greet it. The bags are unloaded at a dank and breezy seaside airbase where a ghostly, grey RAF Nimrod surveillance aircraft can be seen a few hundreds yards away in the gloom.

The post is destined for yet another sorting office at Inverness about half an hour away by van. Inverness airport closes at night, so the Post Office is forced to use the RAF base. Our post van hurries through the night on deserted roads, passing the site of the Battle of Culloden where in 1746 the last full-scale battle was fought on British soil between the ancestors of the local residents, mostly Jacobites, against the Hanoverian English and a sprinkling of Lowland Scots.

On towards Inverness, past the undistinguished Cawdor castle whose attractions were immeasurably enhanced by Shakespeare's Macbeth. Inverness is the only major "mail centre", as the Post Office calls them, which sorts letters completely by hand. The van arrives at 3.45am and some 50 night workers, who have so far been processing local mail, are galvanised by the arrival of the air mail destined for all parts of northern Scotland. At Inverness airport, another aircraft, an ATR 42 turbo-prop, prepares for the 55-minute flight to Stornoway. By now the wind is beginning to pick up. Gales are lashing the Hebrides to the north-west of us and the ferry from Inverness has been suspended as gales whip across The Minch, the treacherous stretch of water between the mainland and the Isle of Lewis.

Pilots decide that flying conditions are just about good enough for the mail plane. The journey is relatively smooth until the aircraft descends to 2,000ft above the storm-tossed sea on its approach to island's small airport. This is when the flight becomes something of a funfair ride. The runway lights ahead appear then disappear as the aircraft is hurled around the dark sky.

The wind is gusting between 40 and 50mph as it comes into land, near the operational limit of the aircraft. The few passengers on board applaud as the pilot brings the plane down and begins to taxi towards the terminal.

At 7.30am - some 20 minutes late - the plane is unloaded on to a van which rocks to and fro as torrential rain and gales tear across the airport. By now the conditions are considered too bad for flying and the plane is unable to resume its journey immediately to Benbecula on North Uist to the south-west. Eventually it takes off at 9.10 am, more than 95 minutes late.

And so on to the delivery office in Stornoway where the letter is directed to its final destination. After the odyssey by van, plane and by foot, Donald MacRitchie receives the letter at 9.20am. He describes the post service as "very good" although he points out that it normally arrives at lunchtime.

To make sure that the letter was not the subject of special treatment - James Taylor of Royal Mail headquarters accompanied The Independent and the BBC throughout the journey - I posted another letter for Stornoway at Canary Wharf in London's Docklands at 12.30. It arrived at the home of Bill Lucas 25 hours later, just over four hours later than the letter to Mr MacRitchie.

The trek from the nation's capital to the Western Isles costs an estimated £12 a letter, about 36 times the price of the stamp. It is money the Royal Mail can ill afford, although it has a statutory obligation to keep the service going.

The state-owned organisation is under constant commercial pressure from private sector competitors which are "cherry-picking" the more profitable mail services between the conurbations, and from the Government, which wants to cut its £150m subsidy.

Something has to give and it is likely to be loss-making rural post offices. Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, is to tell the Commons this week how far it is prepared to support the retail network in the countryside.

Rural dwellers are expected to lose thousands of post offices. But the people of Stornoway and other isolated areas will continue to receive their first-class letters the next day, some of them, The Independent can testify, after a truly epic journey.