MY postman is very good. He's no casual, taken on for a while then transferred to a different area. He's been doing this round so long he knows who everybody is without having to remember their addresses.

Someone once sent me a letter addressed to "Author, Jeannie Johnson, lives in the Wye Valley with an Alsatian dog named Romeo".

My postman knew exactly who they were talking about. I'm wise enough to know this was not because my fame had spread far and wide, though he did know I was a writer of women's fiction. He also knew Romeo.

Every morning, the two of them would go through the same scenario; the postman would attempt to thrust letters into the box, Romeo would tug them through from the other side. He was also very noisy about it – Romeo, that is, not the postman.

Romeo has since passed over to doggy heaven. I think he is as sorely missed by the postman as he is by me. That old dog was a character, and also a kind of landmark.

The postman is something similar; a mainstay of the community. I suppose you notice mainstays and characters more in villages than you do in cities. In the country, a smaller workforce means working as a team, filling in for each other and being a familiar face in the community.

Our local postman is one of the few mainstays remaining. We no longer have a milkman making his rounds. We did have a grocer coming around in a van for a while, but that stopped years ago.

They were both characters, the milkman flitting around the village, annoyingly bright and breezy first thing in the morning and whistling as he did his rounds. The grocer was the sort of bloke who had taken up touting vegetables, but also knew how to tickle a trout or poach the odd salmon – and I don't mean in water in a pan.

Characters don't exist in cities or suburbs, or is it that they're simply not noticed?

We once had a witch, or at least an old friend reckoned we did. He lived next door to the "witch", which meant he had the police at his door if he played his stereo too loudly.

She used to spy on people, especially when they were doing building work or, worse still, she would report them if their road-tax disc had run out. At the time she was considered a vindictive old busybody; in retrospect, she was a character.

Softened by the passing of the years, mention of her now brings a reflective smile to my face. Why did she feel the need to send the local plod along to wrongdoers? Did she merely have a thing about young men in uniforms?

Will village characters die out altogether? Old cottages and dull bungalows are being taken over by outsiders. They don't shop locally unless they run out of milk, and rarely do they poke their nose into one of the local hostelries for a quick half.

Although, in their way, even cities still have characters. I once considered writing for EastEnders, that television soap of simple characters experiencing some pretty bizarre situations. But basically, it's a village; a small collection of people gathered in a square in London. It wouldn't work with a larger cast of characters – they wouldn't be characters.