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Time to reopen our Post Offices
• LAST Thursday I needed to dispatch two parcels (weighing 29kg) to the United States.
It was raining hard, but I believed I could safely cart them down to Finchley Road post office from my home in Belsize Park by strapping them to luggage ‘wheels’.
I would have to pull them for 15 minutes along wet, leaf-strewn pavements and across three busy roads.
But the wheels refused to support them and the whole contrivance collapsed some way down the street. I hailed a passing taxi, and the driver came to my aid in superb fashion, lifting my parcels dropping them inside the post office door. I couldn’t thank him enough, and doubled his fare.
I advised the counter clerk, who could have not been more helpful and practical about his burdensome task, that he should get assistance in dealing with my heavy parcels.
Thus, a happy ending. But there is still no such conclusion to the saga of our two former post offices in Belsize Village and on Haverstock Hill.
Had the Village branch still existed, my journey would have taken four minutes on foot. And my own plight is without doubt replicated, endlessly, when anybody requires to send awkward parcels by mail in our area.
Post Office Ltd should be ashamed at the inconvenience and misery they have inflicted on the public by these closures, while our toothless ‘consumer watchdog’, Postwatch, looks on in indifference.
Belsize Residents Association and the Belsize Post Office Action Group will be staging a demonstration on Saturday December 9 demanding the reopening of the two local branches.
Please join in as next time it may be your parcels lying in pieces on the pavement.
ALAN BROWNJOHN
Belsize Park, NW3
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