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Up early with my daughter and I was in charge for the first three hours, but she’s a bit more self-sufficient nowadays, so I managed to be quite productive with my time and in between playing with her, made a bean pie for tonight’s dinner and got some other admin done. It’s strange when you feel like you’re halfway through your day but it’s 9.30. Three hours of child care is pretty exhausting and though I was set up to have a full day of work it was hard to keep the energy up.
But I did contact my excellent local MP Andy Slaughter with my blog and thoughts about the proposed Post Office closure and he was back in touch within half an hour to let me know that he intended to fight it. My wife has emailed him a few times and says he has always replied very quickly. For all the cynicism about politicians I think it’s only a very few of them who are lazy and self-serving and even fewer that are pure evil. Most of them are diligent and hard-working and having to deal with a thousand different problems at once. So I appreciate that Mr Slaughter (who if he is secretly evil has chosen a name that threatens to out him) is taking this smallish, though important, community concern seriously. It sounds to me like the Post Office people have been trying to keep this change on the downlow, but not only has he still found out about it, he’s trying to do something about it too.
And I decided to feature the issue in my Metro column, which seems only fair after the hard time I have sometimes given this Post Office branch. It’d be great if we could make Ian Post Office reconsider.
And meanwhile there are a million other important issues that need our attention. How can you worry about a Post Office when there’s war in Syria and refugees in Calais? But that’s life isn’t it? We can’t not deal with more minor issues because there are more important things out there. The truth is the bigger things are big because they’re very difficult to sort out and if we neglect the little things then we’ll just have more bigger issues to deal with. The gradual chipping away at our communities is in part at least what has got this country into a mess. We’re only supposed to care about ourselves now. But even if you’re cynical and self-centred you’re still better off in a world where we look out for each other. The rewards might not be immediate or obviously financial, but they will have effects on your lifestyle, maybe your finances and possibly lead to much more dire consequences. If you have no empathy then you should surely realise that it makes sense to have provision to help refugees, lest you be a refugee yourself some time (and the way the UK is going that’s not out of the realms of possibility - do you think the French are going to take us in now? Are they fuck) or to provide decent care and access for disabled people in case tomorrow you are disabled.
So, you know, Shepherd’s Bush Post Office moving to WH Smiths is definitely not the most terrible thing that could happen, but I think it would diminish my suburb if it happened. And I am glad that people are not going to take it lying down. Even though I am pretty sure it will still happen anyway!
