Diary – 19 June 2004

Chelsea Post Office, situated on the corner of Sloane Square, is a regular meeting place for us pensioners as we draw our weekly pension, in cash. Sometimes the queue sneaks down the King’s Road, but the long wait gives us the opportunity to catch up on local gossip and concerns. The ‘persons’ behind the grille are helpful and courteous, and we all know each other well. The government wants us to transfer our custom to Barclays, but if we had a problem it would involve an endless frustrating wait until ‘customer services’ respond from Bangalore or some equally puzzling conurbation.

There is always some incident in the queue to keep us entertained. Last week a delightful pensioner colleague bypassed the queue to weigh an envelope. A young man, seemingly of Asian extraction, shouted out, ‘Get back in the queue. You bloody English, you think you own this country.’ The old man replied, ‘I do.’ The outcome of this fracas is best not reported in a family journal.

Having drawn our pension we drift down the King’s Road to the Chelsea Kitchen. Here a fully cooked English breakfast is available for £4. For lunch or dinner, with our pockets stuffed with cash from the Chelsea Post Office, we catch the 19 or 22 bus, armed with Mr Livingstone’s bus pass, to eat frugally at the Beefsteak or Pratt’s.

Until recently I rather favoured the big new aircraft carriers which are to be a symbol of Great Britain’s new defence strategy. The strategy is called Expeditionary Warfare. Evidently the Joint Strike Fighter, the carriers’ principal weapon system, is too heavy to lift from the carriers’ deck, so I expect the project will suffer several years’ delay and come in hugely over budget.