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@nick_h.
Awesome! But you really should have had that cuppa. What an honour. I had a big crush on her back in the day.
I never got the star treatment. Cilla's husband gave me the stink eye. Ringo Starr was offhand, so I didn't dare say hello to Barbara. Bobby Ball was downright rude. Sam Fox was very flustered, half naked in a room full of men. Poor thing. There was even a very, very senior policeman in his best uniform, just sitting to one side with a drink, watching it all.
The only person who was ever kind to me was a concierge at one of the hotels at the bottom end of Park Lane. He looked me up and down, opened the till, and gave me 50p., saying "you're cleaner than most". Which was true. I washed my face every day. A lot of people didn't. Maybe in the days of leaded petrol the filth was a lot worse than it is now? The layer of it on your face was really gummy. It needed quite a lot of scrubbing.
There was never any courier chic for us, no fakengers. We were the lowest of the low. Things are even worse now. I had another stint 20 years after my Addy Lee time. You're never allowed in reception to sit on the sofa, go for a piss and chat to the receptionist, because absolutely everyone has a goods entrance. It's usually in another street, but they don't give that as the address, and they're too cheap to put a sign by the front door, so the first time you go you try reception, then about turn, put your helmet back on and get back on the fucking bike. There are no facilities at the goods entrance for you to use. Not even a chair. Wait in the street.
There's one place in Canary Wharf where you have to fetch the package from whatever floor it's on, presumably because they've sacked the post room staff. Before you're allowed in the goods lift you have to be issued with a temporary pass, for which they have to take your photo. The whole procedure wastes at least half an hour, for which you can't claim waiting time. And the pay these days is pathetic. Only foreigners do the job. They can scrape by because they'll rent a 1 bed flat and put 6 people in it. Mattresses in every room.
All the fuss about workers' rights in the gig economy makes me smile. Decades ago the gig economy was pretty much just despatch riders and fruit pickers. I can't think who else was in it. We had all the worst features of the gig economy. Piece rates, hazardous work, no sick pay, no assistance when injured, no income on quiet summer days when there's no work, having your wages clawed back for rental of the radio or the bike or the uniform.
A lot of our deliveries were to the desks of Fleet Street journalists who now write about the supposedly newfangled gig economy. We weren't invisible, we were one of the most conspicuous features of working London. But nobody ever enquired about our conditions or death rate. The term 'gig economy' wasn't even invented until Silicon Valley started using the internet to carve up the taxi trade and takeaway food.