Why local post offices are the best of Britain
THE oldest post office in the UK, which has been going about its sterling work since 1712, is on the brink of closure as its retiring owners search for a buyer. I find this an occasion of small but genuine sorrow. For I love post offices deeply. They were a staple of many of my favourite childhood books – characters were forever cashing postal orders to finance midnight feasts, buying stamps and a single envelope and sheet of paper to alert far away uncles in the Forces to devilry by local spy rings. Or they were finding succour from coldly aloof Edwardian homes with the generously bosomed mother-substitute behind the counter.
Plus they frequently doubled as sweet shops and the sweets of yesteryear (Bullseyes! Humbugs! Gobstoppers of a size worthy of the name) filled my dreams then and now.
And in real life they are almost as good. My local one sells all the things I use once and then lose for ever – Sellotape, scissors, pencils, rubber bands, string – thus necessitating at least one emergency replenishment dash a week.
It also holds my oversized Amazon parcels (I know – I’m trying not to), lets me get cash out for free now my local bank branches have closed, buy Premium Bonds (an overlooked last-minute present for children as long as you’re not bothered about them liking you) and supply a frankly astonishing array of official forms when your home printer won’t.
As life becomes ever busier and responsibilities ever greater, it’s a joy to have one place you can depend on to help rather than hinder your frantic efforts to get through another day’s proliferating to-do list before it’s time to collapse into bed once more.
Add to that what post offices offer as nodes of connection for people in isolated villages, or to isolated people in crowded cities – they remain one of the few places where strangers will habitually gather with a few minutes to spare for chat – and my affection and nostalgia becomes mixed with something deeper.
I have come to conceive of post offices and the Royal Mail (technically separate privatised entities now but forever inextricably linked in my mind) as a countrywide emotional support network as well as a postal delivery one. A collective hand in the small of our backs, guiding us gently onwards. Or, if more spiritually inclined, it’s Anglicanism with red rubber bands.
I nearly had a breakdown when they tried to rename it Consignia, and felt an unmistakable swelling of national pride when we, as a people, simply refused to have it. I reckon the word was never actually used unless with a contemptuous sneer or heavy use of finger-quotes round it to express the speaker’s heartfelt disgust.
I need this: I need to be able to go and stand at my little local counter, buy some stamps and feel joined to others – to the people to whom I’m able, for a nominal sum, to send a book I’ve enjoyed or a card to say I’m thinking of them.
And I love to think of all the grandparents and great grandparents I know across the generations who must have done the same thing in similar places, albeit with more wood panelling and brass fittings than nasty grey plastic.
I doubt my branch, in the corner of a corner shop in South-East London, actually began life as an 18th Century staging post for mail carriages as the threatened one – yours for just £275,000 the town of Sanquhar in Dumfries and Galloway – did.
But maybe they all did in spirit. Time and space collapse in a post office and connect us, past, present and future – and all for the price of a stamp.