Death of a Post Office
5 April 2008
Deborah Devonshire laments the death of a post office
They shut our Post Office yesterday. For the first time in living memory there is no early morning light in that end of the ancient cottage and the little shop that went with it. The stacks of newspapers and magazines with unlikely titles have disappeared overnight.
No longer can a letter be weighed to go to the ends of the earth. No more the postmaster, with one elbow on the counter, turning the thick cardboard sheets with the bright-coloured stamps of all prices lurking between them, painstakingly adding them up to the right amount for a letter to Easter Island or Nizhny Novgorod. No more blue airmail stickers to speed the thing along like a migrating bird. The letter box remains, but what good is that without a stamp? It is a ghostly reminder that yet another service in another part of life is finished.
So it is into the car once more to queue in the Bakewell supermarket, instead of walking down the hill, looking at the gardens and the dogs, and seeing the minibus calling for the schoolchildren. What about the old people who haven’t got a car?
What about the other pensioners in the village? No one cares about them because they don’t stab each other after a bout of drinking and have never bothered the police or a councillor in their lives. For these people, who spend most of their time alone at home, the Post Office was like a club. Old and young met there, people called in on their way to work to pick up a paper, as well as children on their way to and from school. They had a chat, a grumble, compared gardening notes or gave news of a former resident who has gone to New Zealand. We all knew each other, we knew when someone was ill or had gone on holiday. Now our meeting place is dark and dead.
The government doesn’t care. It pretends to be keen on ‘rural welfare’ and to have invented community centres. It spends our money building monstrous new ones when our PO was one. A vital support, impossible to value in money but sticking out a mile to those of us who live in villages, has gone.
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D Short
April 4th, 2008 7:13am Report this commentWhy on earth do you publish this woman? Simply because is part of the Devonshire family? As Charles Ryder's father says in Brideshead Revisited: 'Do you hope for a legacy?'
Sue Handy-Routh
April 4th, 2008 12:21pm Report this commentIgnoring the politics of envy ...
I am currently writing a business plan and a book proposal for my Uni course (Furniture Restoration). At the same time answering questions from my neice (design student) in Sydney with regard to the composition of an old chair on which she has to write a 'life cycle analysis'. Also answering emails from furniture experts who are sending me information for inclusion in the book on identifying chair seat-weaving materials. Impossible without email; not wanting or wasting and speedy as light.
Kim Hammill
April 4th, 2008 2:21pm Report this commentIs it not possible to establish a Post Office at Chatsworth? Perhpaps the Duchess could convert the cottage that is(was?) used by the idiot of a former Home Secretary, Blunkett, and put it to a far better use!
Max Kaye
April 5th, 2008 9:38pm Report this commentD Short - maybe because she writes well and evocatively. Your question can be more suitably asked about Ms Venetia Thompson who has made a return after a blessed absence.
Helen
April 8th, 2008 11:26pm Report this commentAs a frequent visitor to UK, searching out the country post offices to buy stamps has always been a part on my vacations. Yes, the postal system needs to be modernized, but these charming old post offices will be missed - especially by me.
Eamonn Collins
April 22nd, 2008 10:44am Report this commentGiven her distaste for modern means of communication,no doubt Miss Devonshire submitted her article handwritten on vellum, carried in a cleft stick by a young oik from the village.
Brent
May 1st, 2008 1:30am Report this commentI have always enjoyed the wit and wisdom of The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. It is indeed very sad to see something that is a part of ones life go away. I hope that something is done about this.
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