Last post for the grumpy ones

I've always had sympathy for post masters working in small, rural post offices, struggling to survive as the Government appears to go all-out to force them to shut.

Switching benefit payments direct to banks, and ditto with pensions, cost them a lot of business - after a storm of middle-class protest, the Government agreed to help the out with grants. And many have diversified.

Go into the Ribble Valley, the most scenic part of Lancashire, and you get wonderful tea shops in post offices. In areas where the post office has already shut, local communities have opened them in churches and pubs.

So where am I going with this? Well thanks to the way it is funded, the BBC's local radio stations provide the world's worst news bulletins after 7pm in the evening. In the North West, all the stations merge together to provide a north west news round-up rather than say, a Lancashire one, which you might expect on BBC Radio Lancashire.

And the location at which the late-duty news reader is normally based often determines the amount of coverage the area gets in the regional bulletin, or so it seems. Therefore I assume that the reader on duty the other night is from Lancashire - hence the appearance of a small-scale protest about Blackburn's central post office.

At first I assumed the post office was to close - which would be something of a blow to Blackburn. But this staff protest was in opposition to the post office being franchised out to a private company to run which these staff claimed would lead to lower standards of service.

Lower standards of service than currently exists in pretty much any central town or city post office? I'm not some sort of post office spotter but in recent years I've had to use central post offices in Newcastle, Birmingham, Chorley, Liverpool, Accrington, Burnley and, yes, Blackburn and I can assure those protesting that it is not possible for the service to get any worse.

One woman in the obligatory BBC vox pop - and I still can't believe this was seriously such an important story to prompt a place in a five-minute regional news bulletin - claimed this privatisation would mean all the staff with 'old school training' would end up leaving.

A threat or a promise love? She boasted that Blackburn Central Post Office offered personal service which would be lost. Personal service? Getting them to look at you in the face would be a nice start. They certainly aren't customer friendly. They see a long queue and go for a break. How else can it be that at 1pm every day, only five of 15 counters are open? They are the most miserable, poh-faced people going, but you can understand why.

The central post offices are the grimmest places going. I'm not a snob - hey, I'll shop in Morrisons every now and again - but I feel dirty when I come out these beige-coloured, grey-carpeted hovels, having normally spent 15 minutes queuing up with a collection of drunks and asylum seekers (who hold the queue up because they can't speak English and the staff's attempt at speaking to them in their native tongue involves slow, loud English) just to be served by people who evidently hate their jobs.

If post offices are to work in the future, they need to attract people to use them, not just those who have to use them. And that involves good customer service. So if franchising these branches out to companies who will redevelop them and operate them more efficiently, so be it. And if Grumpy and Co who work in them now leave in protest, then all the better.