The Post Office is up against it, with increased competition from new media and rival private companies sucking at its lifeblood – and all the trade unions can do is go on strike.

This is the typical, non-thinking trade union approach to change – trying to hold back the tide.

What on earth do they think they are going to achieve by striking?

All that will happen is that more businesses and individuals will find different ways of communicating and the Post Office and employees' jobs will be hit even harder.

Brilliant thinking... well done.

It must be frustrating to be a worker in a contracting industry – the miners, steel workers and many other private companies have all experienced it, but striking in those circumstances is the very worst answer.

How much better it would be if there was total co-operation between management and unions to drive a business forward, changing it to compete in the modern world.

Management has a very important role here, to create the right environment to enable unions to co-operate rather than confront.

Wisdom of Solomon needed rather than old-fashioned worker/management dogma.

Bones horror

Anyone reading last week's Worthing Herald must have been appalled at the story of the crass negligence displayed by Worthing Hospital in handing to relatives a dead man's shoes containing part of his foot.

I have seen pictures of the shoe containing the flesh and bone pieces and it's horrific.

This must go down as one of the worst blunders I have ever heard about.

The person concerned plunged from the top floor of the Teville Gate multi-storey car park.

He died in hospital 11 days later.

It is practice that a person's belongings are handed to relatives, but common sense dictates that, in these circumstances, a check should have been made.

My sympathy goes out to the relatives both in their loss and for this appalling experience.

I hope the hospital has learned a lesson.

Back to the junk

After the brilliant campaign to encourage UK school children to eat healthy school meals, it seems we are slipping back again and kids are pleasing themselves, having packed lunches or getting junk food from the shops.

When I was a school kid many years ago, in the post-war years, I was grateful for anything I could get.

I can remember what real hunger was and there were many times I went really, really hungry.

Nowadays, people buy more food than they know what to do with and kids are thoroughly spoilt.

They pick and choose what they want and naturally gravitate to those junk foods that lack nutrition and build up the fat.

We have a generation lacking the food that mum used to make and, when they get a taste of it at school, with the new "healthy eating regimes", they don't like it because they are not used to it.

The result is they revert back to their old bad ways, encouraged by parents who haven't got the time, inclination or, probably, knowledge to create anything that's not out of a tin or packet.

Convenience takes pride of place over healthy eating.

Recommended

This takes me conveniently on to recommendations I shall be making from time to time on places where we have eaten.

If you're heading out to Tunbridge Wells, look out for the Crow and Gate, south of Crowborough.

Excellent food and realistic pricing – and no fewer than three log fires.