We spent Saturday evening and night in an orgy of present-wrapping for our respective extended families. It was also my sister Rachel’s birthday today. Sunday was Jeremy’s sister Ellés Xmas party, so we got to offload the first one-third of the christmas booty (Jeremy’s sisters and nephew Tiimu), leaving me with the sack that goes south to my father’s family and the sack that goes north with us to visit my mother on Mull.
Today I was visited by my mother and my sister Kate. Since
Kate uses a wheelchair I have learned a lot about the kerbs
along the length of Cowley Road. Ironically a lot of the
obstructions are caused by work on repairing and improving
access for wheelchairs: too bad they could not have taken more
notice of my family’s itinery and get them done a week
earlier...:-) Our back garden sadly looks a little
desolate in winter (pretty much bare earth with some sad-looking
twigs poking out), but to Kate’s Australia-adapted eye
even that looks novel.
I’m now back from a week-long visit to my mother’s in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. (Mull is an island off the west coast of Scotland with a total population of perhaps 3000.) Altogether we had my mum Jenny, her husband Dave, and their dogs Tubbs, Sacha, and Jerome; myself and Jeremy (from Oxford); my siblings Mike (Dundee), Kate (Brisbane in Australia), and Rachel (Guilford); Mike’s baby son Darren; and sometimes Mum’s stray boy Iain and his dog Buster. My reader will doubtless appreciate that even in a relatively large house this constitutes quite a crowd... Still we survived with no casualties, and even got off the island and on the way home before the Great Storms began and the ferries were cancelled.
Darren is 10 months old and cute as a button. He spent a lot of his time on Mull crawling at speed up and down corridors and up and down the various adults who were trying to deflect him from anything heavy or small enough to try to eat or big enough to try to eat him. Actually of my Mum’s dogs, Jerome (the biggest) is no threat; it is Sacha’s misguided attempts to mother him that might have been a problem if we had not kept an eye on him.
Yesterday (the 23rd) we made a point of waiting for the post to arrive before going in to work, but to no avail. When we returned home we found yet another of those cards telling us a parcel was waiting for us at the depot in Sandy Lane West. Since I was taking a day’s holiday on Christmas Eve, I set off to pick up the parcel.
Cycling to the depot would be straightforward enough if it had
occurred to anyone to add a few directional signs along the
route. You start by cycling up Cowley Road past Temple Cowley.
This is a steeper climb than I remembered, and I soon got
very hot. The intersection at Temple Cowley is a little
intimidating—in order to get to the off-road cycle lane
you have to move in to the middle lane (since the left lane is
left-turn-only). The off-road path takes you to the Ring Road
roundabout, and crossing the road on foot takes you to the
cycle+dog path that parallels the Ring Road. This is an ideal
shared cycle path: broad, flat, and only sparsely populated with
pedestrians. The first left would be Tesco’s megamart.
Skipping that you come to a confusing dip-under-the-road
junction with something labelled Barns Road. You need to go up
on to this main road and thereby cross the Ring Road. Another
off-road cycle path now appears, but ignore it; it is leading
you away from a mini-roundabout which you want to use to turn
right on to Sandy Lane West. The home stretch! The trick here
is to not look out for the Royal Mail Consignia
sign, because all you will find at the Reception window there is
a hand-written sign telling you to go back two places to the
Nuffield Industrial Estate. Once you go down there the
Enquiries office is reasonably well signposted. Annoyingly
there is nowhere to park a bicycle. (This is Oxford, after
all!)
Even more annoyingly, there was also a piece of paper in the window saying they were closing the office an hour an a half early today. So the journey was all for nothing.
Could they have prevented this? Yes, by telling me the modified office hours on the card they stuck through my letter box. This card is completely generic, probably printed in the millions at some central printers. Too bad they don’t produce a local version for each Post Town so they can have the address printed on them (we have received these cards with no address on at all in the past). Too bad they don’t have a special Xmas Season version of the card giving their reduced opening times. Given that December must account for a disproportionately large fraction of displaced domestic parcels (as opposed to parcels for business addresses), this would seem a logical measure to me.
On the other hand, is it worth fucking over people like me for the sake of a measly hour and a half extra holiday? Surely that office needs at most two people present (one customer-facing, one fetching parcels), so paying them enormous overtime would not break the bank, right?
