I have decided, through repeated experience, that the most depressing place to go in my town is the Post Office. Needless to say, in line with almost every other town in Britain, it has some pretty stiff competition. For instance, until very recently it was almost TG Jones, a shop that had managed to get rid of a mediocre name only to replace it with a truly crap one. WH Smiths has a certain ring to it. It may be a weak, limp ring, but at least it had something. TG Jones just sounds like a cheap effort to replicate the WH Smith razzmatazz, limited as that may be, and in doing so fails miserably. There is no such person as TG Jones, and if there were they should be embarrassed by the house brick banality and thoughtlessness of the name they had been given. Whatever the name it was or the name it became, that particular branch was notably soul draining. No matter when you went in there, there was always something tired and unsettling and flickering lights about it, and this generated an atmosphere only slightly more jovial than the kind you would usually find in an abandoned abattoir somewhere in northern Russia. Nothing there ever seemed to get sold, to anyone. To be honest, I only ever went in to flick through the music magazines and even then I never knew if the crazy lady with the wheeled shopper bag would shuffle up and start telling me about the son she never had. It was one of those places where the plastic floor boards creaked and the automatic door only worked semi-automatically and you could go to buy a Kerry Katona autobiography, a set of felt tips, a medium Toblerone and a Sudoku compendium all at once. No wonder it’s closed now, though it was never quite as bad as The Post Office.
My high street really doesn’t deserve that name. It certainly never gets me high. You can’t say it has stood still though – where once it was clogged with charity shops, cafes and hairdressers now it is is clogged with charity shops, cafes, hairdressers and vape outlets, which we all now know cover up for a multitude of (insert eastern European country name here) criminal activities. In fact, the high street is so depressed that even the charity shops have started to curl up and die. I think it’s down to two now, and quite frankly the Sue Ryder presents a challenge to the entire concept of optimism. I rarely slip into Sue Ryder these days but when I do, often through crushing boredom or simply to remind myself what it smells like in a cheap care home, I am often back out onto the street within 15 seconds. I know that there is always a chance of finding a little gem in a charity shop on a lucky day but trying to find anything worth just looking at, let alone contemplate buying, in my Sue Ryder is like finding, or more accurately, wanting to find a needle in a haystack in a huge pile of dog shit. At the back end of Sue Ryder is a small, sad section which combines a rack of unwanted cd’s, some laughable vinyl, a job lot of unsold Kerry Katona autobiographies and a collection of heavily abused toys, board games and children’s books. It is quite possibly an attempt by the manager to create a portal designed to connect us closer to hell, and if it is then I must say they’ve done rather a good job of it.
And what else is there to challenge the Post Office, I think I can hear you ask? Well, there is a branch of The Card Factory that is so void of charm it may as well double up as a suicide library. A branch of Boots that somehow manages to make the branch of Savers a few doors down look like a Tom Ford boutique. A pair of hardware stores which sell absolutely everything except whatever it is you came in to find. A Holland & Barrett next to a Gregg’s. A betting shop that may as well be Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, in that I have never seen anyone go in or come out of it and yet the lights are always on and everyone looks an unhealthy colour. A small handful of clothing outlets for ladies, including one that specialises in garish party frocks that would very likely melt into your skin within seconds should they get even close to a naked flame. A flower shop with a suspiciously low number of flowers on offer. A ‘traditional’ butchers, though I’m always a bit confused about quite how ‘traditional’ one can make a cluster of three day old chicken fillets and a polystyrene tray of lamb’s liver wrapped in clingfilm. For those so inclined towards certain, non-taxing avenues of self improvement there is a tanning salon, a tattoo parlour and a triangle of nail bars, one of which seems to be run from outside by a chain-smoking Malaysian. And there’s a McDonalds, where you can walk past miserable teenagers pouting into their McFlurries and admirably out of shape van drivers foolishly assuming that the extra large portion of fries they’ve just got to work on will count as not one, but two, of their five a day; not that they actually give a tiny shit about their five a day.
But, in the end, nothing beats the Post Office for pure, undiluted, fuck-me-this-is-awful-get-me-out-of-here-now barrel scraping badness. For a start it isn’t really a Post Office, it’s a murky, unloved convenience store which just about manages to justify it’s own existence by having a Post Office counter chucked in at the back. The store prides itself on only stocking goods that you can easily find better, cheaper and more in-date versions of virtually anywhere else you could care to mention. It’s the sort of convenience store that still stocks brands and packaging that I had assumed were long ago cancelled or deemed hazardous to the intestines. It stocks greeting cards so crap that you’d rather be greeted with a squirt of bleach in each eyeball. And it stocks a shoddy range of overpowered, overpriced alcohol (you know the kind: think a three litre bottle of 9% cider) and the sort of wine that any self respecting vagrant would happily dismiss in favour of a full-to-the-brim pint glass of their own urine; or indeed someone else’s. It also has a loud two toned beeper that goes off every time someone comes in or goes out of the store and which, on a busy day, is liable to attract the attention of The United Nations on account of the fact it breaks several layers of international human rights. As for the Post Office itself, well I suppose on one level it serves it’s purpose, but it does so so slowly that it feels like you’re watching that famous scene on the beach from Chariots of Fire, only backwards. I have never been in there and been served in under 15 minutes and that is why the Post Office is the most depressing place to be on my high street; because it makes you stand there and wait, with nothing better to do than look around you at everything else and weep like a wide-eyed child who has just walked into a tear gas demonstration. I would buy my travel money there, as the posters suggest, but I fear there is a substantial chance that I would be back from my holiday before I got served. Still, I suppose it beats having to read a book about Kerry Katona. Just.
That’s it. It’s been a while and I just wanted to get that off my chest.
G B Burton. 23.10.2026
