MUCH to my annoyance, I discovered the other day, that someone had been complaining about the performance level of the post office delivery service.

The person concerned was criticising that some mail was delivered slightly later than scheduled and that this was in some way drastic in letting them down.

Well, little do we in Britain realise how good a postal system we have in this country.

When one travels to other parts of Europe and pays considerably more than we do here for posting letter and other items to various addresses, one finds that we haven't got such a bad service after all; especially as we are paying just 28p to send letters considerable distances.

Further to this, should any person need to send any mail or small parcels quickly then there are alternative services which guarantee next day delivery for a reasonable cost.

One may argue that we don't need the postal service with the alternative form of communications we have today such as paging, texting, email, fax and the telephone.

But, should anything happen to these things, then the postal service would still be needed. Also, not everyone has these other forms of communications anyway.

G Crook, Preston, (full address supplied)