The London Loaf: Post Offices
Post Office © Fernando Carmona González
Post Offices are a good place to practise patience. I usually find that I think of the Post Office as somewhere I’ll just pop into quickly on the way somewhere else, so it’s a terrible shock to discover that the queue rivals Alton Towers on a bank holiday.
The best time to maximise on this painful lesson is around 5:15 on a Monday, when you have something for Special Delivery. It may seem like torture, but it can just bring you to have a sense of humour about yourself and your life-and-death missions, because you just have to let them go. Once you do, it’s a great place to people-watch. It’s like a more open version of the tube – we don’t want to be there, but we are, and we have something in common: the wait.
Of course there are some who withdraw into a stupor of resignation, but among the more adventurous a sort of queuing community can develop where there is space for interaction, if only about the price of bubble-wrap.
