The Runner

I’m not your typical civil servant, that’s for sure.  No sitting behind a desk all day for me, no stuffy suit and tie, I spend my life in the outdoors, wearing lycra and trainers.

I’m a runner. A messenger of the old school.

A lot of people don’t understand why I’m needed. “Oh, why not use a cycle courier?” they ask, “they’re quicker, surely?”

No they’re not, not for the messages I take, short journeys, mostly across a small clump of offices in Whitehall, sometimes as far as the city, but all within a few minutes run. No sooner is the letter in my hand than I’m out of the door, tearing across Whitehall.

The problem with bikes is that although they’re quicker once you’re on the road, they’re inconvenient. You can’t have every messenger propping the bikes against the entrance of government buildings, let alone lugging them into the reception area. You have to park them in the designated area, by which time I could’ve run there and back again.

As for “Well, you might as well walk if you’re not going far,” they miss the point too. These are urgent messages and running is the quickest method. It’s efficient, and people feel you’ve made an effort if you’ve been running, and that means that the receptionists you come across are less likely to keep you sitting there half an hour before deeming to speak to you.

It’s an important service, so much so that I was kept on during the austerity cuts which saw 36% of all staff made redundant.

There have been runners at Whitehall since before Whitehall even existed. Anne Bolyne was the first to use runners, taking messages to and from Henry VIII when they were courting. I like to imagine what the messages might have said. “Am I queen yet?” or “Have you got rid of Katherine?” 40 or 50 times a day.  The runner survived, one of the few men not to have slept with Anne after she became Queen – I guess  he was too tired out by running. 

I know all the short-cuts. There are lots of ways to save time. Most of the hold-ups are through getting stuck at reception, but because I know virtually everyone, I know exactly who to ask for in every department and am never sat around waiting. Unlike most of the cycle couriers you see cluttering up the reception of pretty much every government building.

There are other ways to save time. For example, the Foreign Office issue have been issuing a daily memo to the Ukrainian and Russian Embassies ever since the current crisis broke. They’re always issued within a few minutes of each other and, as the two embassies are next to each other, it’s quicker to wait for the second message and deliver them both at the same time.

I carry over sixty messages every day, that’s almost 20,000 every year, and I could well reach a million messages by the time I retire. 

A million messages. And I hardly ever make a mistake, a handful in a lifetime. Sometimes I’ve given a message to the wrong Dave Clark or Steve Smith, but that’s not really my fault, it’s their fault for having such ridiculously common names. It’s a security risk, if it were up to me I’d ban anyone with a common name.

So you can’t blame me for one little slip, mixing up the messages. It’s not my fault that the Russian and Ukrainian embassies are next to each other. Plus, of course, the ambassadors both have similar names.     

This was the first time I ever made a mistake like this, in a thirty year career. But everyone goes: “You started a war,” just because of the bombs Russia dropped on us in response to our confidential promise to back Ukraine in light of any Russian invasion.  The secret plan that I accidentally revealed by delivering it to the wrong embassy. 

But the war’s not my fault. I didn’t write the message, I just delivered it. Don’t shoot  the messenger.

In ten years time I’ll be entitled to my pension. That’s the best thing about this job, it’s a massive pension, you’d never get a pension like that in the private sector. The deal I’m on I’ll make more per week when I retire than I do now.  

That’s if we survive this war. Ten years suddenly seems a long way away.