Back to the Post Office and its hilarious self-defeating adverts. The queues were even longer today and I was only sending off another 15 packages. Still over 100 of you to go. I think I will be waiting til after Christmas to do the rest of you. I perhaps foolishly decided to send out some of the videos from my collection today, which turned out to be quite expensive, which given then shittness of what you're getting might just not be worth the effort. Maybe I should just send you the £1.50 and get you to buy a video of your choice. Ah well, I won't be doing this again. Maybe on the 10th anniversary.
Still, if you can keep your eyes off the hilarious Post Office adverts for a few seconds, the queue always has an entertaining/insane character to help you pass the time. Today there was a short, stocky woman in her later 50s, dressed in trainers, a tatty long jacket, with a strangely childish handbag. She was one of those unashamedly posh old ladies, with a deep and booming voice, who was pontificating continuously to a timid looking, tall, slim woman of about 22 who was standing next to her.
The older woman, as with many posh people, was totally unconcerned that she was talking loudly enough for everyone to hear her, nor did she sense that others were bristling at her class and at her relentless soliloquy. I was trying to work out if the younger woman even knew her, or if posh-o had just started talking to her and she was too shy to tell her to leave her alone. The younger woman simply nodded every now and again, with a pained expression on her face, which could have been down to either familiarity or confusion. They could easily have been French and Saunders characters and they both seemed too extreme to be real. But I think they were real.
The older woman, blind to social convention due to a mixture of her status and her wandering mind, had at one point tried to look into a big bag of packages that a man ahead of her in the queue had left near the front to avoid having to carry it around the snaking queue. Even as he chastised her she continued to look. Then she carried on her conversation. I looked at her tattered clothing and wondered if she had fallen on hard times or whether this was just aristocratic eccentricity. Presumably the former as I can't imagine many people of her ilk queuing up like this in the Post Office unless they had to. But maybe she was lonely and liked the company. Either way it was diverting to try and imagine who she was, where she had come from and what had gone wrong. Though it was hard to let one's imagination fly when her foghorn posh voice kept droning on.
She was talking about foreign travels, not places she had been to, which might have been interesting, but the importance of getting travel and health insurance for when you are gone, detailing various disasters she had had over the years, how after badgering her insurance company over one minor incident she finally managed to wring eight pounds out of them. She was triumphant over this success, but unless that was eight pounds in 1934 then it surely can't have been worth the effort. Everything she was saying was comedy gold and had I been Catherine Tate I would probably have just taped the whole thing and then performed it verbatim (when has she ever bothered about editing things down - she is not bothered. That's her thing). Alas I only got out my notebook latterly to record one wonderful sentence, which pretty much summed up the whole conversation in inanity mixed with paranoia. She said, "I also think I had a blouse stolen out of a suitcase at Krakow airport." It was hard to imagine that anyone would want to steal anything worn by this woman, but the idea that some corrupt baggage handler may have broken into her valise and then thought, "What should I take out of here? A camera? Some money? Oooh, no, that's a lovely blouse, I'll just have that and nothing else. That will be perfect for my short, stocky, wife!" (mind you, it was Eastern Europe, where I am led to understand all the women conform to that basic shape, so you never know).
After every anecdote there was a short pause where the mousey girl would nod and we all hoped the monologue had ended, but after a breath it would continue, as unrelenting as the poster based antics of the false Post Office staff on the screens. Everyone was already annoyed and there was tension in the air, but the old bird, barked on oblivious. At one point she seemed to be interested in her young companion/prisoner. "Do you travel a lot?" she asked.
The younger woman, visibly shaking with nerves, considered the question for a good three seconds, before whispering "yess". But posho was clearly not interested in finding out any more than that as she just launched into another diatribe about how airport workers will pick your locks. It was unbearable and hilarious at the same time.
By the time I've posted off all your gifts I should have enough material for my own sketch show.
