A Rant on the Village Post Box
Apr. 14th, 2008 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jacey
So it's like this... Until eight years ago there used to be a post office and general store in the village. In fact, once upon a time, a long long time ago, yours truly was the village postmistress and grocer. I ran it for 4 years while my kids were tiny and in 1984 I decided I wanted to play at something else and sold the business to a lady who used to work for me. Then I ran away (metaphorically speaking) to join a folk trio. Ex-assistant ran it very well for six years, then sold it on to a chap who sank his redundancy pay from an engineering job into it, struggled with it for ten years, but eventually ran it into the ground by the sheer force of his er... personality. (ME: Have you got [item of shopping]. HIM: I've no call for that! ME: You obviously have because I'm asking for it. HIM: Hrmph!)
The building (still ours) is currently in a state of limbo. (OK, we use it to store junk, okay?)
So when we had a village post office it didn't matter that the postbox was a piddly little thing because anyone with big packages to post could just bring them into the shop to have them handed to the postie in the afternoon collection.
But now we don't have a PO in the village our postbox is still a piddly little thing. The aperture is too small to take a standard A4 letter.
When the Royal Mail charges me extra for an A4 letter regardless of its weight, I do believe they should provide me with somewhere to post said letter without having to get the car out and drive to the next village. The aperture on the current village box it too damn small to take an A4 envelope without folding it. (And if i could fold the contents I'd be sending it in A5 because it's cheaper, dammit!)
The building (still ours) is currently in a state of limbo. (OK, we use it to store junk, okay?)
So when we had a village post office it didn't matter that the postbox was a piddly little thing because anyone with big packages to post could just bring them into the shop to have them handed to the postie in the afternoon collection.
But now we don't have a PO in the village our postbox is still a piddly little thing. The aperture is too small to take a standard A4 letter.
When the Royal Mail charges me extra for an A4 letter regardless of its weight, I do believe they should provide me with somewhere to post said letter without having to get the car out and drive to the next village. The aperture on the current village box it too damn small to take an A4 envelope without folding it. (And if i could fold the contents I'd be sending it in A5 because it's cheaper, dammit!)
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Date: Apr. 17th, 2008 11:34 am (UTC)There are now no shops in our village but a farm shop has recently opened on the edge of the village. The farmer has lived there for years, selling eggs and bags of potatoes. Now it looks as though they're making a real good go of it. Meat, deli, dairy, veg etc., though the vehicle access is horrible (sharp angle, steep ramp down to farmyard, bad vie of traffic when emerging).
Denby Dale is our nearest village with shops and it has quite a good range: a butcher, an open-all-ours mini supermarket which has reasonable fresh veg; a post office and a baker, plus an agricultural feed shop/petfood shop. But all the other shops in the village are staring to get ideas of grandeur. there's now a shiny furniture and interiors shop (and I do mean shiny); two hairdrssers; an expensive kiddies clothing shop; a travel agent; an estate agent; a golf shop. We've just lost the most wonderful hardware shop. You could still buy screws there in ones rather than in blister packs. The old couple that ran it got sick. The lady died and her husband was slowly ailing. Now it's going to be a fabric shop.
On bright spot, though, Denby Dale does have its very own bookshop.
:-)