SIR - With regard to the letter from the anonymous postal worker (Gazette, May 14), I am taken aback by the tone of his reaction to my carefully worded letter.

Am I to assume that as a customer I have no right to comment on the service I receive from a company especially when the service I have paid good money for has failed? Would he accept poor service that he had paid good money for without comment? I doubt it.

It is particularly interesting that there was no hint of an apology in his letter to either me or to the grandmother who lost an irreplaceable present (she has failed to get a replacement anywhere) to a granddaughter, yet we both paid for a service the Royal Mail say they are expert at providing.

It seems that all customers of the Royal Mail must accept the postal lottery (over ten million are lost every year) without complaint. Yet he would be surprised at the many adverse comments about the postal service I have received since the original article.

As far as he is concerned the six letters of mine his company has lost are of no consequence whatsoever, whatever the value of letters were to me. A very careless attitude towards those who are, in effect, paying his wages.

What other commercial company could survive such an attitude? The timing of the deliveries, which was the subject of the original article, has little meaning for all those ten million who did not receive the letters they were expecting.

As it happens I have always supported the special protection given to the Royal Mail and have wanted them to succeed, but my patience with them is growing very thin especially after the content and tone of the two letters you have published recently.

Peter Russell-Yarde, Orchard Leaze, Cam