WHEN plans were announced for opening up the Royal Mail to competition, a few questions were left unanswered.

In particular, it was unclear how anyone muscling in on the postal business could provide a service without duplicating the Post Office's (sorry, Consignia's) network of postmen and women and fleet of vans.

Next month, for example, the market in bulk mail of over 4,000 items is due to be opened up. But while it is prepared and despatched in bulk, bulk mail goes to scattered destinations all over the place. Will the new operators have delivery staff tramping up and down every street, and travelling to remote hamlets, to deliver items here and there?

No. For it turns out that the Royal Mail will be delivering the privatised bulk mail. The way it will work is that the contracted operator will collect the mail from customers, broadly sort it, and then (the picture now gets Alice-in-Wonderlandish) ferry it to Royal Mail sorting offices, where it will be sorted into the appropriate postie's sack.

Since the Royal Mail itself clears most postboxes twice a day, and will continue to deliver most contracted-out mail, the advantage of the private service isn't speed but price - for the private operator doesn't bear the heavy delivery costs.

But already some are complaining about the level of the charge which the Post Office is to make for this service. A spokesman for a company named Business Post says: "We all need access to the Royal Mail for the final mile... Local posties have integrity, are diligent and know their market.''

Quite. And it is largely through its "local posties'' that the Post Office still enjoys enormous public goodwill. How ironic that these most valued members of the PO's workforce are to be pawns in the hands of those whose cherry picking of the most profitable parts of the post threatens to end Britain's universal delivery service.

AFTER 12 exhausting years, the battle against the National Grid's monstrous new power line from Teesside to York has been lost. But public feeling against the line, with around 220 pylons taller than Nelson's column, remains as high as ever.

The message of this remarkable resistance is that public tolerance of the disfigurement brought by power lines, now coupled with health worries, is at breaking point. The type of confrontational incident that has marked the battle of the Tees-York power line could escalate in future into serious local disturbances.

The lesson should be learned now. Currently, the Grid is planning to spend £900m on three sub-sea cables linking Britain's electricity supply to Europe and Scandinavia. The money would be better spent undergrounding cables here.

ASKED if he would be happy to be remembered for his Angel of the North, sculptor Antony Gormley says: "I'm delighted to have made this work but I think that its main use for me is as a goad to something very different.''

Well, since most of Anthony's work continues to be based, like the Angel, on casts of his own body, he could have fooled me.

Published: Wednesday, March 20, 2002