I’ve featured our antiquated village post office (La Poste) a few times in my blog, invariably whining on about the interminable queues, the old Frenchies who want to tell the solitary counter girl about their sister’s bunion, and the fact that La Poste frequently seems to close at will, meaning a 5 mile trip to the nearest town to buy a stamp. But ever eager to use the tons of initiative that somebody gave me at birth, I’ve devised a strategy to eliminate some of these problems.
I now buy my stamps online. You pay exactly the same rate per stamp and, get this, they don’t charge you for posting them back to you, and you can choose your design from the myriad of different stamps they have on offer. You can take your time and ponder over whether to take a strip of stamps showing the Eiffel Tower or a herd of Charolais cattle without making an enemy of everybody in Tourrettes. And when you buy your stamps online you can even upload a photo and have that put on your stamp. This has the danger of being embarrassing however, as anybody, anywhere can use a picture of you without your knowledge and have it printed onto hundreds of stamps, the whole thing smacks of civil liberties. Just imagine getting a letter in the post with a stamp which has your missus snogging good old Francois in the local bar on it. Or a stamp with one of those intimate little snaps of our loved ones we now take with our mobile phones – J – don’t you dare!!!!
Another plank of my strategy is to try and get to La Poste just before noon as everything stops in France at that time for the normal 2 hour lunch. People desert the streets in droves and the queues in La Poste mysteriously disappear.
Or go when it’s raining, as nobody wants to queue in the rain – our Post Office only holds about 6 people and sometimes the queue snakes out of the door and down the lane.
Finally, if there’s anything remotely non-standard about my errand, I give the village a wide berth and head direct to Vence, our local town, where they have a proper La Poste, complete with seven counters and, of all things, a queueing system, which for some perverse reason, the French actually comply with. They don’t normally queue for anything else!
It was on just such a ‘non-standard’ errand that I had desperately wished that my French had been better but afterwards, I was almost as convulsed with laughter as those Frenchies who were standing behind me in the queue.
You see, J had bought some earrings in the UK (in John Lewis I think) but when she opened them up after unpacking, one of them had broken. I would normally have just accepted this little setback and got on with life, but J, like Shadow with a meaty bone from Eds which he refuses to give up, called J Lewis and accepted their offer which was to send the broken earrings back and they would replace them.
I was therefore dispatched to La Poste to send the earrings back by registered post, but given the highly labour intensive operation this would have caused in the village, I headed straight to Vence.
The queue was quite impressive but dividing the estimated number of people by the seven counters and multiplying by the average 3 minutes taken to serve each person, told me that I would only be there for about 30 minutes! It’s great to have a brain!
Eventually, I got to the counter. I noticed that the woman serving me reminded me of that character Molly Sugden played in that classic comedy programme, ‘Are You Free?’. Mrs Slocombe – that’s her.
I said I wanted a Lettre Recommandée. Here follows the conversation……
Where is the letter going to?
England.
OK - Are the contents valuable?
Yes.
What is it?
Earrings.
Earrings?
Yes – earrings.
Can I see them?
(I handed them through the gap. I hadn’t actually sealed the envelope just in case).
Ha – these are not valuable. (holding them up and inspecting them).
Yes they are? They’re very expensive – why else would I be sending them by registered post?
Hey Juliet (handing them to the girl at the next counter) – do you think these earrings look expensive?
(Juliet holds them up, places them against her ears, takes a compact mirror out of her handbag and says).. Nah – these are cheap earrings. Did he buy them as a present for her?
Were they a present?
No. She bought them herself in England so they must be expensive. Anyway, why does it matter?
Because if they were expensive you would need insurance, but as they’re cheap earrings, you won’t need to bother.
How much is the insurance?
Depends on how much the earrings were.
What’s the starting price for insurance?
(By now, people in the queue had stopped bothering about when they would get served and were listening en masse to my discussion with Mrs Slocombe).
Insurance starts at €10.
Don’t bother. Just send them without it.
OK – (weighing the package ) that’ll be €8…..about £7.
When I got home I relayed my little story to J who said …….. oh you shouldn’t have bothered then – they only cost £4 !!!!!
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