1) I'm an affluent white male and I never use the post office, so neither will you. 2) If your village post office closes down there's sure to be another within a ten mile drive. It's no real hardship to hop in your car! 3) Small post offices aren't financially viable. And they only exist to make a profit, so we have to shut them down. 4) You can always buy your stamps in advance. They sell books of stamps at the till in Waitrose, you know. 5) Get someone to buy you a stamp machine for Christmas. You know it makes franking sense. 6) The new size and weight related postal charges are extremely simple to understand, so there's no way you'll ever need to go along to a post office in person to check you've paid the correct postage. 7) Why not catch a bus to your nearest post office? All buses were privatised several years ago too, so market forces mean there's bound to be a frequent service going in the right direction, leaving soon. 8) Gathering together in village post offices doesn't breed a sense of community, it breeds germs. Go home and don't breathe over me. 9) Instead of wasting the earth's resources on paper, send the other person an email instead. It's so easy even my grandmother could do it, if she had a computer. 10) Walk to the main post office in your nearest market town, why don't you? It can't be far down that pavement-less country lane, even with a zimmer frame. 11) Look, they've stopped post offices from issuing TV licences, and you can now apply for passports online, and they're withdrawing the Post Office Card Account, so why the hell would you want to go to a post office anyway? 12) We all need to take more exercise. A vigorous ten mile round trip to your new local post office will help to cut heart disease. 13) Why don't we shift all these endangered post office counters into one of the other shops in each village? There's a lovely antiques shop in my village which I'm sure would be glad of the custom. 14) Doesn't everybody do their banking on the internet these days? I know I do. 15) What our smaller post offices need to do is diversify. Sell newspapers, brew coffee, run an internet cafe, install a cashpoint machine, that sort of thing. 16) All those redundant postmasters and postmistresses will easily be able to find new jobs in the thriving rural economy. If all else fails there's always eBay (except they may find it difficult to post their parcels...) 17) Stop moaning. At least we're not shutting down your local organic farmers' market. Now that would be ghastly. 18) We could cut down the number of post offices to just one per county. OK, so the queues might be a lot longer, but we're British, we'll cope. 19) Stop getting all emotional about a service you never use any more. When was the last time you actually stepped inside a post office, eh? 20) Come to think of it, why don't we scrap daily postal deliveries too? The postal service would be much much cheaper if everyone had to go to their nearest sorting office to collect their mail. I mean, most of it's junk anyway. And you can always send the au pair on your behalf, can't you?
