A postman picks up a letter from a pile, looks at the address and slowly puts it into a pigeonhole. Then he takes another and repeats the process. Nearby, a group of colleagues stand watching him. They are worried about him as they can see things aren't quite right. Later, they discover that he has been threatened by a violent thug and so pay the thug a visit and spray him with red paint. Job done, the biggest of them – fondly known as “Meatballs” – triumphantly explains the reason for his heroism: “I'm a fucking postman!”

A few days after I watched this unlikely scene from Looking for Eric, Ken Loach's new comedy, I heard the same words repeated by an acquaintance at a garden party in Oxfordshire – though this time without the expletive.

The last time I'd seen this man he was the marketing director of a business that sold organic TV dinners. But since then his company had been sold to a multinational and, after a brief spell as a consultant to the new buyer, he had been eased out altogether.