Special Delivery

The longest round in the county has only ever gone one way.

Then a notice arrives from the area office. Anything marked Special Delivery, guaranteed by one o'clock, is to be taken out first, whatever order the road happens to be in. It sounds like nothing. It is a small red label and a promise.

Dougie Ogilvie is three years into Route 4, and he knows exactly what that does to a round that works because of the order it is done in. The kettle that is on at the grid at five past nine. The gate that has to be shut behind him. The old woman who must not be allowed to think she has been left. Every Special sends a postman the wrong way down a road that has only ever been driven in one direction, and every one of them costs something no guarantee has a line for.

Across a summer that ends a newspaper, an October that cannot decide what weather it is, a gale the whole of Scotland learns a name for, a March hotter than any March on record, and a Diamond Jubilee kept in the rain, one man finds out what a guarantee is worth, who it was ever really for, and what a place does when it is put out of order.

Warm, wry and quietly moving, Special Delivery is the third instalment of The Aberdeenshire Postman.

For readers who loved The Longest Post Round and Every Door and want to know what the next year brings.