What is it about village post offices?

And I thought ours was bad!

Crikey! Our post office was in the kitchen of a cottage in our village, until the post mistress retired and it closed down, our nearest is now 4 miles or so up the road, that will now be very handy as NatWest are closing most of our local branches and we will depend upon the remaining Post Offices. Of course we have no public transport so it’s out with the cars again.

kitty It sounds as though your village is a close relative of Midsomer!

Someone should put all that in a book! It could be a best seller! I often found myself wondering why postmasters/mistresses tend to be a little on the miserable side (ours wins awards for miserableness!), but I was talking recently to the man who runs what was our local newsagents and P.O. in our previous neighbourhood and he was telling me the reasons why they have now given up the franchise for the P.O (apart from one failed break in, and then an armed robbery, that is!). I can’t say I blame them a bit, even though there is no P.O. to serve the community as the only other nearest one has closed also.

What a village! Is there something in the water?

As gd says a book in the making

We on,y have a mobile post office twice a week. Sadly, they aren’t here long enough to cause a scandal

Oh, I forgot the miserable one who was almost done for fraud was held up on his way home - or so he said!!

You couldn't make it up could you,?On a serious note it's a shame the powers that be didn't leave well alone , it all seemed to work perfectly well back in the day.!! Or so I/ we thought.

Good lord, never a dull moment in your village, Kittylester!

The post mistress in our village when we moved here was rather curmudgeonly but it turned out that her bark was worse than her bite. I used the PO often, including getting my weekly Child Benefit there. It was also the village shop, selling the basics.

Then she retired and it was taken over by a family of two brothers, the wife of one of the brothers and their two children, and the brothers' old mum. The hours of the PO were cut and ridiculously didn't cover the start and ending of the school day, which was right next door, so fewer people used the PO.

The brothers smoked heavily and it became unpleasant to go into the shop because of that - who wants a loaf of bread that stunk of smoke?? The old lady was so bad tempered that once my husband thought she was going to hit our small daughter!

In the end both the PO and shop closed permanently and to top it all, one of the brothers was then sent to prison on child pornographer charges. Yuk.

Wow KL one will never know what goes on behind closed doors or in your case "behind Post Office Doors" what a shame everyone has been made to suffer

The postmaster/postmistress's pay is not an attractive one, and they are expected to "diversify" and use other means to get a reasonable income stream. Inevitably some of them try dodgy tactics.

Until quite recently our post office was run by a family as a sideline to their small corner shop. The one most often on the PO counter was mostly all right, but English was not his first language, and his manner could be a little harsh. Every parcel was greeted with a brusque "What's in it?" and he wanted detail, not just a generalisation. Then the PO changed their policies, and the whole shop closed, PO and general store both. A similar corner shop a couple of hundred yards away took over the PO stuff. It was always a rather better shop anyway, and it is a better PO.The proprietor is an Asian man, and it is usually his wife (I think) on counter duty. She is efficient but pleasant with it. I don't know whether it is coincidence, but when he is also in the shop, she wears the scarf of her sari over her head, when he is not she is bareheaded.

Just seven in 25 years, kittylester!
What do you do the rest of the time?

How dull it is in rural Oxfordshire. I live in a large village which, when we moved here, had a small Co-op in a quiet lane and the lady who lived next door to it, ran the PO.

Over 20 years on, the Co-op has relocated to a bigger new store on the main road and the PO is run by the lady who ran it when we arrived, now past retirement age and working part time. The days she doesn't work another past retirement local man works there. He has been there nearly 10 years.

No scandals, no fraud, nothing but good service and friendly smiles.

That's only the post office dj!

We are surrounded by stables and farms and all sorts of stories come out of there.

Then there was the woman who worked in the tiny financial advisers - everyone loved her until they found she had emptied the accounts of lots of people in residential care.

The last vicar but 3 didn't believe in the Bible and is now on his 3Rd wife.

The next vicar took the turkey he was fattening up for Christmas into school assembly!

I know there's probably been no actual murders (hopefully)
but do you live in a Midsomer villlage?

Thank you kittylester was feeling really glum and your post madee laugh so much ?

We rented in Salisbury for a year in the early 2000s. Large Waitrose on the ring road had a Post Office. I've often thought since then with Post Offices closing that big supermarkets should be obliged to provide some PO services in order to get planning permission. I know this wouldn't help folks without transport but good Samaritans could help when they do a food shop.

The post office in my village is going to close and be moved to the Spar.
At the moment it is in the newspaper shop, but the Post Office has asked them to stay open late every evening, and the paper shop owner says no, it wouldn't be worth it for the number of people who would want to use it at night.

Wow! Kitty gives you all plenty to talk about.?
Our village PO has been run for donkeys years by a very nice couple, with no breath of scandal.

Yet, lemon, yet!

....or they keep a good secret.

The woman who owns our village shop is a jobsworth of the first order. The post office bit used to be in a separate kiosk with fortified glass etc., but now it shares the shop counter so you have two queues side by side with quite a bit of pushing and shoving not to mention lack of privacy where the PO is concerned.

One day I went in to buy a stamp and as the shop was empty and she was standing behind the shop part of the counter, that's where I went.

She told me you could no longer buy stamps from the shop counter, you had to buy them from the post office so I took two steps to the left. She then took two steps to her right.

My DGD who was with me burst into giggles when she said,

'How may I help you?'

Ours was open late at one stage and it was a boon but we have no papershop in the other half of the shop so it's not a goer!