Gibson Lane Cyclist Now Being Used To Deliver Parcels

The delivery firms serving Haddenham have quietly arrived at an arrangement under which anything small, light and urgently wanted is no longer driven to the door at all but handed over a hedge at the top of Gibson Lane to the village's fastest moving woman, who takes it, says nothing, and is gone before the van door has finished sliding shut, this being the only method anybody has found that beats the one way system, the school run and the hole outside the bakery.

A courier in his thirties, who has worked the village round for two years and now carries a spare bungee for the purpose, explains the mathematics of it plainly. The van does forty parcels in a morning. She does the last mile in the time it takes him to find a legal place to stop. Nothing is signed for, because signing for things requires stopping, and stopping is the one part of the process she has given up.

A depot planner in Thame has gone as far as drawing her onto the whiteboard as a dotted line, which the Regional Last Leg Consortium, a loose arrangement of three depots that meets whenever the printer is working, has agreed to call an informal partner asset rather than a hazard.

Householders on Gibson Lane have adapted, as villages do. A man at the lower end now waits on his step with both hands out like a slip fielder, and reports that his daughter's birthday present arrived at head height, at speed, with a Halloween skeleton still taped to the gate it came past, and that this is the best service he has had since the post office counter moved.