Albie Finch knows that Mrs. Compton at number 7 Chandler’s Row has not opened her curtains since Thursday. He knows this because he has walked past her window every weekday morning for thirty-three years, and the curtains are always open by seven. On Thursday, they were closed. On Friday, closed. On Saturday, he knocked.

She had fallen.

“Nothing broken,” Mr. Finch said, recounting the episode with the calm of long experience. “But she’d been on the floor since Wednesday evening. She was embarrassed, mostly. I made her tea and rang her daughter.”

He paused. “That’s the thing about a postal round. You notice things. You notice when things change.”

Albert Edward Finch, 61, known to virtually everyone on his route as Albie, will make his last delivery on Friday, 27 February, after thirty-three years as a letter carrier for the Bobington General Post Office. He has walked the same Docklands route — Round 14, covering Chandler’s Row, Pilot’s Alley, the lower stretch of Harbourfront Parade, and nineteen connecting streets — since 1993. By his own rough calculation, he has walked approximately 48,000 miles in the course of his duties, or very nearly twice around the world.

“I don’t have particularly good feet,” he said, a remark that appeared to amuse him greatly.

Mr. Finch joined the Post Office at twenty-eight, having previously worked as a warehouse clerk and, briefly, as a fishmonger’s assistant at Bramblegate Market. “I wasn’t cut out for fish,” he said. “Too cold, too early, too much arguing about mackerel.”

He was assigned Round 14 on his first day. He has never worked another route.

“They offered me a transfer to Midtown in 2004,” he said. “More prestige, better tips at Christmas. I said no. These are my streets.”

His streets have changed considerably since 1993. The lower Docklands were, by Mr. Finch’s account, rougher then — “more warehouses, more rats, fewer coffee shops” — but the people, he maintains, were essentially the same.

“Working people,” he said. “People who get up early and come home late. People who write letters to their mothers and get bills they can’t pay and sometimes receive parcels they don’t expect. That’s the same in 1993 and 2026.”

Mr. Finch’s knowledge of his route is, by any measure, encyclopaedic. He knows that the Delverian family at 22 Pilot’s Alley receives a letter from a relative abroad every second Thursday. He knows that old Mr. Goss at 19 Harbourfront Parade orders seed catalogues in January, gardening gloves in March, and one bottle of whisky — by post, from a distillery in Edgeminster — every December. He knows which dogs bite (the terrier at number 31), which gates stick (every third one), and which letterboxes have springs so stiff they have drawn blood.

“Twelve of them,” he said, holding up a hand. “And I have the scars.”

“You build a map,” he continued. “Not of streets — of people. Their rhythms. Their habits. When someone stops getting letters, you wonder. When someone starts getting a lot of letters, you wonder differently.”

Mr. Finch has, over his career, discovered two house fires by smell, interrupted one burglary in progress (the burglar ran; Mr. Finch did not give chase, citing his knees), witnessed three births — “well, I was outside each time, but I heard them” — and delivered an estimated 1.2 million pieces of mail.

“I’ve never lost a letter,” he said. “Delayed a few, perhaps. There was an incident with a puddle in 2011. But never lost one.”

His replacement is Maisie Hollander, 24, who transferred last week from the Caldwell Central Sorting Office. Miss Hollander, who grew up in the capital and has visited Bobington once previously — on a school trip aged twelve — has been shadowing Mr. Finch since Monday.

“It’s a lot of stairs,” Miss Hollander offered, diplomatically.

Mr. Finch has been walking her through the route at what he describes as “half pace” — stopping at each address to share the particular intelligence that no briefing document contains. Who prefers their post through the door rather than in the box. Who will invite you in for tea and keep you for forty minutes if you let them. Who has recently been bereaved and should be spoken to gently.

“You can’t write all this down,” Mr. Finch said. “Some of it you just have to carry.”

Miss Hollander, who appears both slightly overwhelmed and determined not to show it, said she had been surprised by the intimacy of the work.

“In Caldwell, at the sorting office, the mail is just… mail,” she said. “Bundles. Numbers. Out here, it’s Mrs. Compton’s curtains and Mr. Goss’s seed catalogues. It’s personal.”

Mr. Finch’s colleagues at the Docklands Post Office — there are seven carriers in total — have organised a small retirement gathering on Friday afternoon. The Postmaster, Arthur Gullick, described Mr. Finch as “the most reliable man I have ever worked with.”

“He has not taken a sick day since 2009,” Mr. Gullick said. “And the one in 2009 was because his wife made him. He had pneumonia.”

Mr. Finch’s wife, Joan, confirmed this account. “He was delirious,” she said. “He kept trying to get out of bed to deliver the post. I had to hide his shoes.”

On Friday evening, after his final round, Mr. Finch plans to walk from the Post Office to the Harbourfront, stand at the railing, and look at the river.

“I’ve done it a thousand times,” he said. “But never as a retired man. I imagine it looks different.”

He is, he admitted, worried about Miss Hollander.

“Not because she isn’t capable,” he said quickly. “She’s sharp. She pays attention. But a route takes years to learn properly — not the streets, the people. She’ll get there. She just needs to walk it.”

Asked what he would miss most, he did not hesitate.

“The dogs,” he said. “Even the one that bites.”