Should Argyll be the next to get a breakaway – from Paisley?
The issue isn’t quite the same, of course.
Morvern has got its breakaway post code – moving from Oban’s PA34 to its own PA80 – because it’s part of a different landmass from Oban. Separated by water from Argyll’s mainland and its Isle of Mull, the Ardnamurchan peninsula, which includes Morvern, is as close to an island as you can get – and a big one.
To get from Oban to Morvern means either leaving Oban on a chain of two ferries or driving north, taking a different ferry and then driving another 70 miles south. A postcode shared by such different and distant places naturally led to all sorts of misdeliveries.
The shared post code has meant the Oban area seeing courier vans endlessly scouring it for addresses which were actually in a different world. Late delivery has been the norm and non-appearance familiar. Food products and perishables have, more often than not, arrived beyond their useful and usable lives.
But Morvern has won the battle – after 15 years. How’s that for a reaction time. The Post Office has agreed that it should have its own post code which will avoid the sort of lottery described above. But, in the bureaucratic way of things, the white flag has not yet been raised.
The Post Office has ‘to consult’ its ‘stakeholders’. So in January it will be seeking the views of those at Morvern’s 200 addresses.
Perhaps it would also consult its Argyll stakeholders on whether they want an Argyll post code or remain, as Morvern has been, harnessed by post code to a very different world. Oban is to Morvern what Paisley and Greater Glasgow is to Argyll, a relationship between a relative metropolis and a rural idyll.
Identity is caught in the detail of the all-but-invisibles of post codes, vehicle registration plates and telephone area codes.
Argyll’s postcode is a cart-pulling-horse affair, designed to suit the clerkly mind and ignorant of the deeper messages it sends.
Whatever the argument for procedural convenience, it is not beyond the capability of man to cluster different postcodes to be handled in the same sorting and delivery sector. That is what will be happening to Morvern and Oban – if the ‘stakeholders’ are minded to go their own way.